Meet Kamilah Bywaters, the Nevada School Board Candidate Who Wants to Target Children with the Racist “Equity” Agenda

Bywaters supports policies that would indoctrinate children with gender and racial propaganda and make schools less safe

Clark County, Nevada School Board candidate Kamilah Bywaters opposes removing illicit material from schools; supports harmful, expensive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies; and backs a disciplinary agenda that would endanger students and teachers.

As Restoration News has covered, the Clark County School District (CCSD) has faced outrage from parents and parental rights groups for pornographic material and LGBTQ+ indoctrination in school libraries and class assignments.

This election presents concerned parents the opportunity to tip the balance of power or, at least, elect a minority bloc that prevents the worst of the radical Left’s agenda in the greater Las Vegas area. Four of the seven voting School Board Trustee seats—Districts A, B, C, and E—are on the ballot this November, and only one has an incumbent. Bywaters is running in District E, which covers the suburb of Summerlin and northwest Las Vegas.

Bywaters’ opponent, Lorena Biassotti, founded the Nevada chapter of the parental rights group Moms for Liberty (M4L). She also founded My Children’s Advocate, an organization that opposes transgender grooming and Critical Race Theory.

Biassotti has two teenagers in the CCSD and two children in private schools. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she homeschooled them because of school mask mandates. She told the Nevada Independent, however, that she doesn't want parents to have to take their children out of public schools to protect them from policies and materials with which they disagree, noting, “If you have to take your children to a private school and pay a tuition on top of your tax-paid education . . . you’re paying twice as much.”

Radical and Out-of-Touch

In September, Bywaters expressed shock that voters oppose her, considering she has two master’s degrees and is working on her PhD. She assumed that they must just be “really committed to diminishing the work of black women.” She went on to express hope that the new generation of young people will dismantle the “work that our traditional colonial society has created.”

She is a fan of socialist presidential candidate Cornel West, who called former President Donald Trump a “neo-fascist gangster,” the U.S. “a white supremacist empire,” and questioned “whether America is even capable of treating the masses of black people with decency and dignity.”

She co-presented "Not Black Like Me: Perspectives/Experiences of Black Women Doctoral Scholars at a PWI When There Are No Faculty Who Look Like Me," at the 2022 Critical Race Studies in Education Association (CRSEA) conference. CRSEA describes itself as a “consortium of experts” who counter and combat “systemic and structural racism,” recognize “the multiple locations of oppression and . . . effects of their intersections,” and co-construct “liberating knowledge . . . to transform schools and communities.”

Before beginning her career as a graduate student and activist, she taught for three years at Canyon High School before quitting, claiming the experience was like “corporate America.” She allegedly faced discrimination, which caused her to co-found the Las Vegas Alliance of Black School Educators. The group advocates for DEI in schools and has also lobbied the CCSD to implement affirmative action hiring.

According to her campaign website, she is the former Education Chair for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network’s Las Vegas chapter and a member of Congressman Steven Horsford’s (NV-04) “Equity Cabinet.” Horsford infamously voted against the SAVE Act, which would have banned non-citizens from voting in federal elections.

Turning Schools Into Transgender Indoctrination Camps

Bywaters fully supports the radical LGBTQ+ agenda of indoctrinating children from a young age in the celebration of gender dysphoria.

Even before the primary, she centered her campaign on opposition to M4L and supporting everything it stands against.

A post she shared from a radial leftist group on X criticized M4L for opposing pro-LGBTQ+ books and allowing teachers to display pro-LGBTQ+ propaganda at school.

She agreed with and shared another post falsely accused Biassotti of belonging to the Ku Klux Klan.

Bywaters has received endorsements from Planned Parenthood—the second-largest provider of transgender hormones for children as well as the nation’s top abortion provider—Make the Road Action, and Silver State Equality—an affiliate of Equality California, a group that helped enact policies that enable minors to get sex changes without their parents’ permission.

In a discussion with supporters on Sept. 3, Bywaters discussed the issue of gender dysphoria and parental rights, stating: “We have to accept every student, and we should—it’s called being a human being—and we should accept who our children are in accepting their pronouns.”

She went on to express support for the CCSD’s policies of supporting students who choose to explore their sexual identity. As Restoration News reported, those policies include hiding a child’s perceived sexual identity, pronouns, and name changes from parents.

She related a conversation with a voter who asked whether she would inform parents if their child was using different pronouns or wanted to change their identity.

“In my experience, that hasn’t been the severity of the case,” she allegedly told the voter. “But we have somebody we know, Giovanni Melton . . . who was killed because he was gay. His Dad killed him. So, I’m always in a mind frame—I brought that up to the person: If you knew your husband was going to kill your child would you tell him?”

Bywaters’ view of the role of educators’ needing to protect children from backwards, sometimes homicidal parents demonstrates leftist assumptions that the state’s pedagogically trained apparatchiks make better guardians than mothers and fathers.

But the case she cites isn’t even true. 

Wendell Melton was sentenced to life in prison in 2022 for killing his 14-year-old son Giovanni in 2017 in Henderson. The defense argued that Wendell’s gun accidentally went off during a struggle after Wendell confronted his son over skipping school. Giovanni’s mother accused her ex-husband of killing their son for being gay, which Wendell denied. The Henderson police did not find that as a motivating factor, prosecutors never alleged it as motivation during the trial, and the federal government never brought hate crime charges in the case.

From SEL to DEI

Bywaters supports implementing culturally responsive teaching methods, developing social-emotional learning (SEL) standards, and enacting DEI policies.

An article she co-authored in Intervention in School and Clinic urges special educators to engage in time-consuming “pre-work” to implement culturally responsive teaching. This includes additional professional development such as interviews with “community leaders.” Bywaters and her co-authors urge educators to conform their methods to disparate cultures rather than treat American students equally. They argue that teachers who identify as BIPOC (black, Indigenous, and people of color) already have experience dealing with “systemic oppression,” subtly making the case for affirmative action in urban hiring. 

To implement SEL, she proposes beefing up schools with psychologists and social workers. Her view of the teacher’s role would require significant pay raises, as it requires teachers to be more than educators. This would all require more taxpayer funding in a school district that already spends nearly $12,000 per pupil on education.

As Restoration News has shown, SEL is “a radical social rearrangement that shifts authority over children from families to schools” and a taxpayer-funded boon to leftist nonprofits who specialize in SEL.

In a May interview with the group CCSD Parents, she cited whether a candidate respects diversity and inclusion as “the bottom line” that Trustees should look for when choosing a school superintendent.

She also supports Restorative Justice—an aspect of DEI—despite opposition by the Nevada Department of Education, because she believes traditional disciplinary methods unjustly target black pupils.

Restorative Justice spread after former President Barack Obama’s threatening “Dear Colleague” letter, which berated schools for racial disparities in discipline. The results have been disastrous for safety and learning because rather than punish students for bad behavior, schools encourage them to sit in “restorative circles” and talk about their feelings under the belief that this will teach empathy to those who misbehave.

In 2019, Nevada passed a Restorative Justice law, which made it illegal for schools to expel pupils, even if they attack staff members and cause bodily harm. Schools became less safe, and CCSD enrollment went down, but it had a minimal effect on disparities. Before the law, black students were four times as likely to be suspended or expelled as Hispanic students. After it passed, they were only three times as likely to be suspended or expelled.

Biassotti lists ending Restorative Justices policies as a high priority of hers, and they contributed to a Rancho High School student getting beaten to death in 2023.

America’s public school systems will go to those who consistently show up. Voters registered to conservative parties in District E have the numbers to keep Bywaters out of office if they show up in November.

Bywaters backs every aspect of the radical Left’s agenda to revolutionize American society from the children up. In promoting gender ideology and forcing equal outcomes, it produces a school system that is less healthy, less safe, and less educated. It also undermines families by replacing parental authority and demonizing traditional values.

“We are on the receiving end of hatred,” Biasotti told the Nevada Current. “Our values are being hated. We’re facing discrimination for holding a traditional belief that we were raised in.”

(READ MORE: In Nevada, Decency is on the Ballot in Clark County School Board Races)