Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) on Tuesday asked the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division (CRD) to investigate allegations of racial discrimination in Missouri public schools.
The foundation claimed that the underlying issue of racial discrimination in Missouri’s Springfield Public Schools (SPS) was not resolved as expected and that the discrimination has been rebranded as “access and opportunity.”
SLF previously represented two SPS teachers in 2021, who claimed they were forced to undergo “equity training” that includes discussing their place on an “oppression matrix” and advocating for “changes in political, economic, and social life.”
The training, which took place in 2020 in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests, also claimed that they had to be actively anti-racist while on duty because the training said “white silence” is white supremacy.
“It is highly disappointing that we are continuing to see school districts in this country that are actively trying to imbue racial division within its staff, with the goal of then having it trickle down to its students,” SLF President Kim Hermann said in a statement.
