Long Beach Unified School District Pays Kids $1,400 to Become Leftist Agitators

Enhancing students’ skills in reading and math… or training students in progressive activism?

Long Beach Unified School District in California seems to favor the latter, paying high school students $1,400 each in taxpayer money to become left-wing social justice warriors. And we wouldn’t even know about it if not for an investigative report from The Free Press—highlighting the urgent need for transparency in public schools so that parents can find out what’s happening to their children.

According to The Free Press, the district paid students to join a club run by Californians for Justice, a nonprofit that claims to be a “youth-powered organization fighting for racial justice.”

These stipends for students engaging in activism were just one of the many payments that the district made to the progressive special interest group. Between 2019 and 2023, the district paid Californians for Justice nearly $2 million for various programs, including training sessions for teachers and students. According to the Free Press report, these sessions involved Californians for Justice-trained students lecturing their teachers on such topics as “implicit bias,” “student voice,” and “antiblack racism.”

Timothy K. Minella is a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy. He advances policies and develops programming that promote constitutional principles in education and public life.