The Baldwin County Board of Education has unanimously approved $29,200 in federal Title I funds for four professional development workshops at Elberta High School, delivered by Solution Tree — an education publisher and training provider whose broader catalog includes materials on diversity, equity and inclusion that have drawn scrutiny in several states.
The vote is a routine-looking line item that sits on top of a national argument, and the details are worth separating carefully from the framing.
What the Board Approved
The funding request covers four Solution Tree training presentations across four dates during the 2026-27 school year:
- Oct. 22, 2026 — Jasmine Kullar: Using Student Data to Inform Instruction, Grading, and Feedback Practices
- Nov. 12, 2026 — Mary McCorvey: Supporting Diverse Learners and Inclusive Classrooms
- Feb. 11, 2027 — Bill Ferriter: High-Impact Instructional Practices
- March 18, 2027 — Bill Ferriter: Student Engagement and Ownership of Learning
Baldwin County Public Schools Superintendent Marty McRae approved the $29,200 request on Aug. 11. The board approved it unanimously at its Aug. 20 meeting.
The $29,200 comes from Title I, the federal program that directs supplemental funding to schools serving higher concentrations of students from low-income households. Title I dollars carry spending restrictions and are commonly used for exactly this category of expense — professional development tied to a school’s improvement plan.
The School’s Stated Rationale
The funding request submitted on behalf of Elberta High School described the workshops as part of a locally driven improvement effort.
“Elberta High School is committed to providing high-quality professional learning that directly supports instructional improvement and increased student achievement,” the request reads. “Faculty members identified priority areas for professional development through school improvement planning, instructional data analysis, and collaboration regarding teacher and student needs.”
The request continues: “These learning experiences will provide teachers with research-based strategies to strengthen instructional practices, improve the use of student data to guide decision-making, enhance support for diverse learners, and increase student engagement and ownership of learning. The professional development is aligned with Elberta High School’s continuous improvement goals and the district’s commitment to high-quality teaching and learning.”
By that account, the sequence ran from the faculty upward: teachers identified priority areas, the school built a request around them, the superintendent approved it and the board funded it.
Who Solution Tree Is
Solution Tree is a large education publisher and professional development provider. It is best known in American K-12 education for its work on Professional Learning Communities, or PLCs — a school-improvement framework built around teacher teams that meet regularly to review student work and assessment data, identify which students have not mastered specific standards, and adjust instruction accordingly.
The PLC model is one of the most widely adopted school improvement frameworks in the country, and it is broadly non-controversial on its own terms. Its central mechanism is structured collaboration around student data.
Solution Tree owns and publishes All Things PLC, which grants tier classifications to schools implementing the model. J. Larry Newton Elementary School in the Baldwin County system recently celebrated receiving PLC Promising Practices Status, one such tier.
Records from All Things PLC show at least 18 Alabama schools across three school systems operating on one of Solution Tree’s PLC tiers.
Notably, Elberta High School is not among the publicly listed PLC-recognized schools — which indicates that the number of Alabama schools using Solution Tree materials and training is higher than the recognition list alone would suggest. Recognition tiers are opt-in designations, not a registry of customers.
The Part That Has Drawn Attention
Solution Tree’s catalog extends well beyond PLC implementation. The company publishes books, workshops, webinars and on-site services across a wide range of instructional topics, and a portion of that catalog addresses diversity and equity directly. Its on-site professional learning offerings include a school equity audit.
Among the titles and offerings in the broader catalog:
- “The Antiracist School Leader: What to Know, Say, and Do,” which describes teaching educators to “reinforce systems that lead to equitable student outcomes” and to “practice strategies for addressing stakeholders’ fears, deflections, or rejections of antiracist work”
- “Raising Equity Through SEL: A Framework for Implementing Trauma-Informed, Culturally Responsive Teaching and Restorative Practices”
- “Building Blocks for Social-Emotional Learning”
- “Finding Your Blind Spots: Eight Guiding Principles for Overcoming Implicit Bias in Teaching”
- “The Identity-Conscious Educator: Building Habits and Skills for a More Inclusive School,” which the publisher describes as providing a “framework for building awareness and understanding of five identity categories: race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability.” Its sixth chapter addresses gender identity, gender diversity and related classroom practices.
Some Solution Tree workshops include what the company describes as “strategies and resources for navigating anti-racism,” encouraging educators to “initiate conversations rather than reacting to questions” and to “examine the beliefs, expectations, and habits that create an equitable, justice-driven school environment.”
The company has also described its own internal practices, saying it “started their DEI journey with a two-day Cultural Competency Training with a DEI expert” and later partnered with the organization Paradigm for self-paced staff learning after that training received positive internal feedback.
The Gap Between Catalog and Contract
Here is where the story requires precision, because the catalog and the contract are not the same document.
None of the four workshop topics Elberta High School requested appears among the presenters’ advertised presentations on the Solution Tree website. The four funded sessions are described in the request as covering student data and grading practices, support for diverse learners and inclusive classrooms, high-impact instructional practices, and student engagement.
Three of those four are, on their face, standard instructional-practice topics that would appear in the professional development catalog of nearly any K-12 vendor. The second — “Supporting Diverse Learners and Inclusive Classrooms” — is the one whose meaning depends most heavily on content that has not been made public.
“Diverse learners” and “inclusive classrooms” are terms with a long and specific history in special education, where they refer to students with disabilities, English language learners, and students working at varied ability levels, and where “inclusion” describes the practice of educating students with disabilities in general education settings rather than separate ones. The same phrases also appear in DEI contexts with a different emphasis.
Which meaning applies to the Nov. 12 session is not established by the publicly available records. The session title does not appear on the presenter’s advertised list, and the request’s own description of it — “enhance support for diverse learners” — does not resolve the ambiguity in either direction.
That is the honest state of the record: a vendor with a broad catalog that includes explicitly antiracist and identity-focused materials, and a specific four-session contract whose listed topics are conventional instructional-practice subjects, one of which uses terminology common to both worlds.
Why This Is a Live Question in Alabama
The broader context is that DEI programming in publicly funded institutions has been the subject of sustained legislative and political attention in Alabama and across the South in recent years. That attention has generally focused on higher education, but K-12 spending decisions involving outside vendors have drawn increasing scrutiny as well.
Districts, for their part, generally argue that vendor selection is driven by instructional needs rather than ideology, and that a publisher’s full catalog is not a description of what a given school has purchased. Critics counter that funding a vendor at all directs public money to an organization whose broader output they oppose.
Both positions have internal logic, and the Elberta contract illustrates why the disagreement is durable: the same facts support both readings depending on whether one weighs the catalog or the contract.
What Would Settle It
The most useful documents for resolving the question would be the actual session materials for the four workshops — the slide decks, handouts and agendas the presenters will use at Elberta High School. Those would show what teachers are being asked to do rather than what a publisher sells generally.
Professional development contracts of this size are typically accompanied by scopes of work, and school systems in Alabama are subject to public records requirements that generally reach such documents.
Until then, what is on the record is a unanimous board vote, $29,200 in Title I funds, four dates, four named presenters, four topic titles, and a vendor whose catalog is considerably broader than the contract in front of the board.