(May 2, 2025): Daily Mail reports on the Department of Education’s decision to investigate Evanston-Skokie School District 65 following a complaint by Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) on behalf of one of the district’s teachers. In the complaint, SLF pointed to multiple examples of racial discrimination in the school district, through teacher trainings and meetings, classroom curriculum, policies, and practices. Daily Mail highlights once incident where staff were required to acknowledge their “white skin privilege” and to “fully examine the cultural implications of whiteness in schools.” And in student lesson plans, District 65 taught that the nuclear family furthers “whiteness/white supremacy” and must be disrupted. Students were also required to participate in a “privilege walk,” where students learned about “colorism privilege” by taking steps forward or backward based on prompts relating to skin color. And a book taught to Pre-K through 5th grade students included a depiction of a devil holding a “contract binding you to whiteness,” where “whiteness is a bad deal.”

Dr. Stacy Deemar, a District 65 teacher, first filed a complaint alerting OCR to these practices in 2019. Following a lengthy investigation, OCR found that District 65 committed civil rights violations. But just a few days later, when President Biden took office, the letter was inexplicably rescinded. Dr. Deemar, represented by SLF, then sued District 65 for its ongoing racially hostile environment and race-based programming. Since the unlawful programming has not stopped, SLF and Dr. Deemar have now called on the Trump Department of Education to investigate the district, which it has agreed to do.