Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public's Trust, says the West Allis-West Milwaukee School District's 2025-2030 strategic plan details goals of "increasing staff diversity" and prioritizing "hiring and retaining a diverse workforce that better reflects our student population."
His team, which monitors public officials and institutions for ethics, transparency, and accountability, filed this federal complaint after taking similar action against another school district in Vermont.
"We received a tip from a concerned citizen … and what we discovered when we looked into it was yet another school district that was prioritizing politics and ideology over the civil rights and the needs of students," Chamberlain summarizes.
They are setting goals for certain ethnicities and using terms like "equity," which Chamberlain says is wrong.
"People in education know … that means putting the needs of certain students above the needs of others based upon certain characteristics that the students can't control and using criteria like that rather than merit and looking to improve student achievement overall," he details.
Though the strategy does include plans to increase student success as well, the Daily Caller says the district admits that only 33% of its third grade students are testing proficient or advanced in literacy and 33% of its eighth graders are earning the same status in mathematics on the state exam.
"[B]y creating a goal of an increase of 'diverse' teachers, the implied, and logical, goal is to reduce the number of teachers that are not 'diverse,'" the complaint reads. "This is discriminatory. Furthermore, assigning a numerical value to the goal for race-based hiring, as the District has done, represents an even more direct and egregious affront."
Chamberlain's organization wants the Department of Justice, Department of Education, and Department of Health and Human Services to investigate these potential violations of the civil rights of the district's students and potential hires – and to take whatever steps they need to correct the violations those agencies find.
Meanwhile, Protect the Public's Trust hopes knowing that "somebody is watching" will compel school districts across the country to do the right thing on their own, which is focus on advancing the needs of students.
