Dalton - the School that Never Learns

 

What is it with the Dalton School? Better yet, what is it with Dalton parents who shell out $64,300 to have their kids be told they're either victims or oppressors, depending on their melanin content?

This blog has a bit of history with Dalton. For you new parents, I'll get to that momentarily. But first...

Do the letters NAIS POCC mean anything to you?

Probably not, but the Naked Dollar is here to help.

It stands for National Association of Independent Schools People of Color Conference.

It is an annual event that that started back in 1986 with 200 attendees - way back, even, before anyone had dreamed up the letters "DEI."

This year, 8,000 people attended. 

The conference is a festival of acronyms: DEI, CRT, SEL, and every other corrupt manifestation of identitarianism that has bubbled up from the academic sludge pits in the Age of Woke. It's a repudiation of equality in the name of equity, of individualism in the name of collectivism, and very much a large, money making industry.

This year, the POCC also featured a healthy dose of anti-semitism because, well, that's fashionable on the left these days.

One keynote speaker, Dr. Suzanne Barakat, accused jews of "ethnic cleansing." One of her areas of focus, her bio states, is "asyee health."

(And here I was, thinking I kept up with the ever-changing landscape of progressive nomenclature! "Asyee" is apparently short for "asylum seeker," which is, here at the Naked Dollar, short for "illegal alien.")

I could go on (and on) about the conference and the NAIS specifically (now a fully captured, woke organization to which private schools pay tens of thousands a year for membership), but I'll leave that for another day. 

Back to Dalton.

In December of 2020, at peak George Floyd/Covid woke, an inside source sent me an eight-page document of BLMish demands that Dalton teachers and admins were making on the school. It was crazy stuff, like mandating that black students be placed in positions of leadership whether or not they won elections, or, my personal fave, that 50% of all donations to the school be re-routed to public schools.

So, I broke the story, and that began a contentious back-and-forth with the school that lasted a couple of months. (If you scroll back to December of 2020 or search for Dalton, you can see the whole series.) The Naked Dollar blew up, getting over a million hits in two months.

Clearly, I'd struck a nerve.

The Wall Street Journal reached out, so I penned a piece for them, outlining the madness.

This culminated in the firing of Head of School Jim Best. His sin? It wasn't the wokeness, it was more like allowing the curtain to be lifted.

So, Dalton had an unpleasant few months, from which they learned...nothing.

Sources who were at the POCC have confirmed that Dalton sent a delegation of forty-eight teachers and administrators to the conference. 

Forty-eight!

Just to crystallize this for you Dalton parents, let's go through the math, shall we?

Conference registration                        $875

Round trip airfare to Denver (est.)         500

4 nights hotel                                       1,000 

4 days meals (est.)                                 250

Total                                                   $2,625

x 48                                                  $126,000

That's right, Dalton parents. $126,000, give or take, of your money was spent on this grift. 

The best part is, Dalton brags about it! Here's a picture of the 2022 delegation in the Dalton News:

                            
        

They point out that they annually bring the largest group!

(Parenthetical question from the bleachers: I don't see any white faces there. I get that it's a people of color conference, but whatever happened to multiculturalism? How are we ignorant, microagressing white folks supposed to fully understand our complicity in structural racism if we can't workshop it and maybe drink some mules with y'all?)

Anyway, if DEI is your thing, great, it's a free country, and Dalton is a private school. But 126k is full rides for two deserving kids from the Bronx. Isn't that preferable to four days of affinity group pow wows and intersectionality seminars?

(Did I just say pow wow? I guess my invitation for next year will be rescinded.)

P.S. Btw, for those interested, I have written a novel that has its satirical way with the Upper East Side and its woke private schools. It's called The Sandersons Fail Manhattan, and it's now available for pre-order on Amazon.

Here's the link.