COVID relief money was supposed to help students recover from lost learning, but in Albuquerque Public Schools, a chunk of it went in a very different direction. Records tied to the district show a heavy investment in anti-racism training, raising fresh questions about how pandemic aid was used and whether students got the help they were promised.
The district approved $336,500 in American Rescue Plan funds in 2021 for training connected to the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, or PISAB. Accounting records later obtained by America First Legal suggest the district ended up spending nearly $700,000 on the effort, which is a far cry from a simple back-to-basics recovery plan.
District officials said they could not immediately confirm the spending or say how much of it came from federal COVID relief money because the records were not readily available. That answer only deepened the spotlight on the program, especially since those dollars were meant to address learning loss, attendance problems, and other fallout from the lockdown era.
PISAB has drawn attention for training materials that describe race in sharply ideological terms. The group has received grants from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and has circulated language telling “White folks” to “learn how [they] became white” while defining race as a “specious classification of human beings created by Europeans (whites)” to assign human worth and social status and maintain “power and privilege.”
At APS, the training came through the Anti-Racism Training Institute of the Southwest, or ARTI, which had worked with PISAB for 23 years. The district’s lineup included “Community Conversations,” “Introduction to Undoing Racism,” and a multi-day “Undoing Racism” workshop, all framed around equity and anti-racism concepts rather than direct academic recovery.
The reach was wider than a few administrators in a conference room. During the 2020-21 school year, principals and assistant principals went through “Community Conversations,” and by July 2022, at least 721 district staff members had attended ARTI training, according to records obtained by AFL.
That scale is what triggered the sharp criticism. America First Legal counsel Bobby Crossin argued that money meant to help children hurt by government lockdowns was instead steered into ideological training that shaped teachers and administrators instead of strengthening classrooms.
Julie Levin, senior counsel at America First Legal, said the concern is especially glaring because Congress sent schools this aid to get students back on track. “You had all of this money that Congress was giving to school districts to get children back on track after the COVID pandemic,” Levin told Fox News Digital. “Instead of using that money to help the students, they were using it to pay for these anti-racism trainings.”
The records also suggest APS had bigger ambitions for the program. Internal documents show the district considered nearly $1 million in DEI training through 2024, with plans to reach nearly 2,000 people each year, which signals the initiative was not a one-off but part of a broader push.
For a time, the district even looked past employees and toward students. In fall 2022, APS officials proposed adding “a student component to our equity/anti-racism model,” with 20 to 30 students per school at up to 10 middle and high schools, starting with “foundational equity/anti-racism principles” before students built their own projects.
APS later said that student piece was never put into action. Still, the district’s relationship with ARTI did not stop there, and in 2023 the institute sent APS a $27,000 estimate for in-person “Undoing Racism” training, showing the pipeline remained active.
The district has defended the programs by saying they were meant to improve student outcomes. “We haven’t received criticism about this,” a district spokesperson wrote in an email to Fox News Digital. “But generally speaking, we used the program to help with attendance and academic achievement for students.”
Levin said the issue goes beyond Albuquerque, arguing that the same kind of training continues to show up in cities across the country. She pointed to PISAB’s ongoing classes in places like Seattle, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Brooklyn, and said public-school dollars should not be funneled into programs that divide students and staff by race.
“The People’s Institute to this day is offering these classes throughout the United States,” Levin said. “All you have to do is go to their website and see that month by month there’s the calendar of these training classes that they are offering either directly in person, virtually, or through third parties.”
She added that the broader fight is not over. “America First Legal will continue exposing where public-school dollars are being diverted away from our children’s education toward ideological programs that divide Americans by race and reshape our schools around an insidious political agenda,” Levin said.
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NO Defund then