What started as a “day of action” at an elementary school in Seattle has ballooned into a week-long focus on black students, “social justice,” and a left-wing agenda backed by labor unions in schools across the country.

Next month, “Black Lives Matter at School” will host its second annual Black Lives Matter at School Week to pressure schools across the country into accepting a list of demands, and to expose “tens of thousands of students” to lessons about “the 13 principles of the BLM movement,” according to Seattle teacher and “anti-racist activist” Jesse Hagopian.

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Hagopian told Socialist Worker that Black Lives Matter at School expanded on a list of three demands promoted during last year’s event to now include calls to defund school resource officers. The group is also encouraging educators to expand classroom lessons focused on race to include “direct action” through rallies and protests.

The effort is underwritten by the nation’s largest teachers union – the National Education Association – and it’s coordinated with the help of educator activists in the classroom.

“Last year, we came together as a national movement with three demands,” Hagopian explained. “The first was to end zero-tolerance discipline and replace it with restorative justice, the second was to hire more black teachers, and the third was to have black history and ethnic studies in schools. In addition to that, we broke down the 13 principles of the BLM global network into teaching points for each day of the week.

“This year, we’ve expanded on that by adding a fourth demand, which is ‘Fund counselors not cops.’”

The national Black Lives Matter in School movement spawned from teachers at John Muir Elementary in Seattle who partnered with a group called Black Men United to Change the Narrative to hold a Black Lives Matter day in 2016.

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“Social Equity Educators” with the Seattle Education Association then expanded the Black Lives Matter at School Day into a citywide event that ultimately recruited about 3,000 of the city’s roughly 5,000 educators.

“Many educators taught lessons about institutional racism that day,” Hagopian said. “It was a powerful action that attracted local and national media attention.”

The idea quickly spread to Rochester, New York, and Philadelphia, where it was developed into a “week of action,” he said.

“Thousands of teachers across the country participated last year … in over 20 cities. Many of those cities we directly coordinated with and helped to organize, and some of the cities just heard about it and organized their own actions,” Hagopian told Socialist Worker.

This year, it will be much bigger.

“We hope to engage tens of thousands of students across the country in lessons that illuminate the 13 principles of the BLM movement. In addition, we hope to help transform the unions too, so they can see how much more powerful our movements can be if we challenge anti-black racism head on, and bring in black struggle and incorporate it into the union struggle,” Hagopian said.

“With that in mind, one of the new features of this week of action is that we’re calling on educators, students, parents and community members to hold rallies in their cities … at your local school board or City Hall, in support of the four demands and calling to make BLM at school.”

The 13 principles of Black Lives Matter include the headings Diversity, Restorative Justice, Globalism, Queer Affirming, Unapologetically Black, Collective Value, Empathy, Loving Engagement, Transgender Affirming, Black Villages, Black Women, Black Families, Intergenerational.

The movement’s more high-profile endorsements include numerous union bosses; the editor of the far-left “Rethinking Schools” and former president of the radical Milwaukee Teachers Union, Bob Peterson; Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the UTLA that recently led 30,000 educators on a strike in Los Angeles; Black Lives Matter agitator and discredited journalist Shaun King; former leader of the domestic terrorist organization the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers; as well as several college education officials and a few leftist celebrities and professional athletes.

Parents can glean more about what the Black Lives Matter at School is all about by reviewing the classroom materials provided to teachers on the group’s shared Google Drive.