Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) is sounding the alarm on ongoing DEI and racial discrimination happening in Missouri’s largest school district, Springfield Public Schools (SPS). In a letter to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and Department of Justice Civil Rights Division (CRD), SLF seeks an investigation into SPS’s continued assault on our nation’s Constitution and civil rights laws. Enough is enough. SPS must stop discriminating, stigmatizing, and stereotyping teachers and students based on skin color.
SLF is all too familiar with SPS’s race-based policies and practices. Since 2021, SLF has represented brave educators in a challenge to the school district’s mandatory anti-racist training. But that training is just one part of a bigger picture, where SPS has been undermining equality in the name of “equity.” As SLF details in its letter, SPS pushes the idea that true equality (equality of opportunity) must be sacrificed at the expense of equity (equality of outcome), which requires broadly grouping individuals by their race, treating them differently on that basis, and pitting racial groups against each other. This directly opposes what the Constitution requires of our government, so SLF is calling on federal authorities to investigate the school district immediately.
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SPS has spent many years entrenching equity and critical race theory into its school system. It updated its strategic plan to require DEI initiatives, then hired staff who would implement those goals, including taking a course on how to bring critical race theory into K-12 schools. It then mobilized additional staff to serve as “equity champions” to lead its equity initiatives.
Following social and political unrest in the summer of 2020, SPS required its entire staff to attend an equity training that fall. Before the training, staff were told they needed to become “equity champions” and were given several readings on white supremacy and white privilege. During the training, they were given handouts on white supremacy, oppression, and identity. Staff were told over and over again that the trainings were meant to be uncomfortable and that equity was part of their job responsibilities. And SPS made it very clear through its handouts and presentations that when it said “equity,” it meant that white people are privileged oppressors and non-white people are oppressed victims, and that America was founded on that system of oppression. Finally, SPS called on staff to become “anti-racist” advocates who were opposed to white supremacy, white privilege, and all the other negative stereotypes it associated with white people, all while undermining America’s very founding.
SPS’s efforts to ignore and undermine our Constitution should not have gone ignored. Federal officials should have taken steps to intervene and defend equality, but the Biden Administration was all too eager to look the other way since it had adopted its own equity agenda. SLF was forced to sue SPS on behalf of two educators in 2021.
Even though SPS claimed that it “paused” the trainings due to the lawsuit, it has vowed to resume them someday. And SPS has simply disguised—not discontinued—its commitment to equity by rewording its strategic plan and renaming its DEI office without changing any of its goals or commitments. The district continues to offer equity and anti-racism trainings. Most recently, it showed a video on how to “create anti-racist school culture” by setting up racial quotas for classes and recruiting and hiring teachers based on race.
And SPS continues to promote teachings that stereotype white individuals through concepts like white supremacy and white privilege. It even recently posted a job opening for educators from “underrepresented and under-resourced backgrounds,” where it plans to prioritize recruiting and hiring teachers of color.
Given all these examples—and many more laid out in its letter—SLF is urging a federal investigation from OCR and CRD. The government should never be in the business of sorting and dividing individuals by race, and this is all the more true in America’s schools.