Educating the young mind of a student is no small thing. Teaching and raising a child are massive undertakings, requiring a steady buildup of trust, skills, and self-confidence. Parents, above all, need schools to exhibit a dedication to the individual child that their future matters, and that their experience is valid.
For school officials in Denver, however, the individual isn’t important. To them, the identity group the child belongs to matters more.
Plans to Marginalize
Last week, Denver Public Schools (DPS)—the largest public school district in the state of Colorado—announced its new Strategic Plan. In it, the district not only openly admits to giving special treatment to students and parents based on skin color in the past, but also boasts about plans to do more of the same in the future.
DPS’s latest plan announces that it will be putting “students of color” on specialized learning plans. These are defined to include, among other things, Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs. These plans are typically designed to provide equal access to education for students with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia or an auditory processing disorder. They are educational products for the specific needs of individual students and are not meant to be used based on a student’s race.
At the same time, DPS casts a broad net to target “marginalized communities,” which it defines by reference to race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. For these groups, DPS provides additional resources to “accelerate” their learning paths. Moreover, DPS says that it will gauge the success of its Strategic Plan based on whether it improves the education of these groups.
Discrimination by Policy
When DPS declares that they will write a blank check of providing specialized learning plans based on a person’s skin color, sexual orientation, or gender identity, it divides our community along these lines, particularly along racial lines. Instead of treating each student as a unique individual, DPS’s Strategic Plan makes sweeping generalizations about students, and announces that resources will be distributed based on these generalizations. This not only does a disservice to students with genuine learning needs, but unfairly labels students within a group as inherently less able to learn than their peers.
This is unethical and unconstitutional discrimination, pure and simple. Mountain States is acting to stop it.
Denver Public Schools is obsessed with group identity, and officials seek to divide the Americans under their care according to race and sex. If the Strategic Plan is allowed to go forward, students and parents alike will be treated differently on qualities that have nothing to do with their character or competency, but upon traits irrelevant to learning.
The Strategic Plan will thus result in greater unequal access to education for students in Denver.
Mountain States in Action
Mountain States Legal Foundation has always been committed to equality under the law and has worked tirelessly in years past to hold governments—like public school districts—accountable to that cornerstone principle of our nation.
On September 22, 2023, we filed an official complaint with the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). In our complaint, we highlight all of the ways that DPS’s Strategic Plan uses race in an unlawful manner.
Our goal is for the OCR to find that the Strategic Plan violates Title VI, the federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, as well as Title IX, given its consideration of sexual orientation and gender identity. Such a declaration will go a long way in stopping and reforming DPS’s approach to educating Denver’s children.
As Will Trachman, general counsel for Mountain States, said, “The Supreme Court recognized that schools must be colorblind when it comes to race, and that’s why affirmative action is unconstitutional. Here, DPS has opted to run headfirst into a brick wall, and draft a strategic plan obsessed with racial divisions, among other things. It won’t be allowed to stand.”
