America First Legal released records showing Albuquerque Public Schools, New Mexico’s largest district, spent hundreds of thousands of federal COVID-19 recovery dollars on “anti-racism” training from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), a group backed at its inception by George Soros.
The training was delivered through the Anti-Racism Training Institute of the Southwest (ARTI), a PISAB partner for 23 years.
Documents show APS allocated $336,500 in American Rescue Plan Act funds in 2021 and has spent nearly $700,000 overall. Training began in the 2020-21 school year with all district principals and assistant principals, then expanded to other staff. By July 2022, at least 721 APS employees—from teachers to senior leadership—had attended sessions that included “Community Conversations,” “Introduction to Undoing Racism,” and multi-day “Undoing Racism” workshops.
District officials also planned nearly $1 million in spending through 2024 to train almost 2,000 people per year and later proposed expanding the programming to 20–30 students per school at up to ten middle and high schools. PISAB materials instruct participants to view the world through a “Lens of Race” and include guidance for “White folks” on “how [they] became white.”
AFL said the federal funds were intended by Congress to address pandemic-related learning loss, not ideological programming. The group is continuing its investigation into PISAB’s influence in schools.
