Judge Dismisses Teacher's Case vs D65
Case ends after 3 years of litigation; costs limited thanks to membership in legal cooperative
Kudos to Evanston Now and Evanston Patch, who beat me to the story. You can read the order dismissing the case here. You can read their stories for some background. You can also read the original complaint from June 2021 or download a zip file of all the back-and-forth of filings here.
It has been a notable story for a few reasons;
The case resulted in a weirdly issued, reversed, and now ??? letter of finding to District 65 from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. The case is still open with the Department of Education.
The case also ended up in a filing with the Supreme Court supporting the end of affirmative action.
Ultimately, the court concluded that the teacher, Ms. Deemar, did not sufficiently demonstrate she suffered an injury traceable to the District’s actions. Specifically, the court found that:
Exposure to Messaging: Her exposure to the District's race-conscious programming and messaging did not constitute differential treatment based on race. The court emphasized that the Equal Protection Clause targets differential treatment, not mere differential messaging.
Affinity Groups and Segregated Meetings: Ms. Deemar did not allege that she attended or attempted to attend any racially segregated meetings or affinity groups, nor did she allege any adverse consequences for not attending these meetings.
Student Affinity Groups: Ms. Deemar was not personally affected by the student affinity groups and cannot assert the rights of third parties (students) through her complaint.
Most of the programming detailed in her complaint and subsequent suit centers around the Beyond Diversity™ and Courageous Conversations™ programs offered by the Pacific Education Group (PEG). Since 2007, Evanston schools (D65 and D202) have spent around a million dollars with PEG, and I’ve written about them a lot.
ETHS still works with the Pacific Education Group and staff speak at the annual conference. It’s unclear if District 65 still does, I could not find any bills for them in the 2023-24 school year. Folks have told me that Beyond Diversity™ training is still required for new teachers, but I cannot confirm this claim. The affinity groups that formed the basis of the suit are a core tenet of PEG training - there was a similar case in Seattle - Diemert vs Seattle that details affinity groups a bit more.
Cost to Taxpayers Minimal 🙏
Back in May, I tried to figure out how much this case cost the taxpayers and the answer was essentially nothing, because District 65 has liability insurance.
The matter you inquired about was submitted to the Collective Liability Insurance Cooperative (CLIC) which has a $25,000.00 Retention for the School District. Thus, the district does not have invoices processed regarding this matter. The assigned law firm for this matter was Himes Petrarca & Fester.
To the extent that the litigation didn’t go through the District’s normal legal process, the cost seems somewhat contained. Even the OCR complaint process went through CLIC. In SY2023-24, District 65 spent $564,431.70 with the legal cooperative (you can see in my list of bills). It’s not clear how the $25,000 retention works, exactly, but I couldn’t find any bills from the lawyers involved here.
The District has to pay the first $25,000 for each case brought against it, unless the retention does not apply to defense costs but only to judgements or settlements