NJ school head who segregated faculty meeting by skin color, CRT resigns

The head of a posh New Jersey prep school, Rodney De Jarnett, where tuition can run as much as $54,500 annually, has resigned less than a year after one of its teachers quit over the use of critical race theory by the administration.

Rodney De Jarnett, Head of Dwight-Englewood School in north Jersey, stepped down “effective immediately” amid an investigation into conduct inconsistent with the private school’s “values and standards of behavior,” reports the New York Post, citing a Monday email to parents.

“We want to assure our school community that the identified conduct did not involve our students,” said the email.

“The [Board of Trustees] cannot provide additional information because of the confidential nature of the independent investigation.”

The resignation is likely connected to accusations that the school used critical race theory to create “a hostile culture of conformity and fear” by Dana Stangel-Plowe, an English teacher who resigned last year over the issue.

“The school’s ideology requires students to see themselves not as individuals but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood,” she wrote in an open letter to the school’s administration published by the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism.

“They must locate themselves within the oppressor or oppressed group, or some intersectional middle where they must reckon with being part-oppressor and part-victim. This theory of power hierarchies is only one way of seeing the world, yet it pervades D-E as the singular way of seeing the world.”

Stangel-Plowe lamented that that fixation on power and group identity works against the qualities required to work through competing ideas, like intellectual curiosity, humility, honesty, reason, and the capacity to question ideas and consider multiple perspectives.

She also accused De Jarnett of telling faculty that “he would fire us all if he could so that he could replace us all with people of color” on two separate occasions.

Stangel-Plowe also recounted a faculty meeting where teachers were segregated by skin color. Any with light skin were placed in a “white caucus” group and asked to “remember” that we are “White” and “to take responsibility for [our] power and privilege.”

The board told parents that De Jarnett’s departure “is occurring sooner than expected,” and it looked forward to “a bright future for Dwight-Engelwood.”