Wisconsin School District Covering Up Racial Discrimination, Lawsuit Claims
A school district in Wisconsin is withholding records around a policy that appears to have instructed staff to discriminate against students based on their race, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by a prominent conservative law firm in the state.
Last January, several district employees reached out to Daniel Lennington, a lawyer with the Wisconsin Institute for Law Liberty, to tell him that the Madison Metropolitan School District was directing teachers to prioritize meetings with black students above other groups. In his communication with the employees, Lennington was provided a screen grab that he was told represented official district policy regarding creating small instructional groups for instruction in reading, foundational skills, and math, the lawsuit states.
According to the screen grab, included in an affidavit from Lennington, instructors were to “prioritize your African American students meeting with you first and more often,” and to “prioritize your English Language learners meeting with you second and more often.”
“In my view, this public record confirmed exactly what had been alleged against MMSD: that the district was, in fact, discriminating against students based on race,” Lennington said in the affidavit.
Because he had only been provided a partial record, Lennington filed a records request with the district on January 31, 2022, for the complete policy and other related records.
In March, more than a month after filing the request, Lennington followed up, and was told that “public records are reviewed in the order in which they are received. We will review this request as soon as possible.” Lennington followed up five more times over the last year, most recently in December, and has received no response.
Last June, a WILL intern sent a separate records request to the Madison school district for a list of adopted textbooks. The intern was informed that “due to the COVID-19 pandemic, staff constraints, and the increase of public records requests received, we are experiencing a delay in responding to requests.” The district has not provided any records for that request either.
Another request that Lennington made last March for a small number of PDFs took about eight months to fulfill. In September, a resident of a Madison suburb filed a lawsuit against the district after he waited nine months for records about high school football. A local TV news station has also reported on its long wait for records from the school district about a reassigned high school principal. “The request has taken so long to complete, it isn’t just about the emails anymore. It’s about your tax dollars, accountability, and your right to know,” NBC15 reporter Elizabeth Wadas wrote in September.
“It’s ridiculous. There is no records request that should take six months to fulfill,” Wisconsin open records lawyer Tom Kamenick told the station.
WILL also sued the Madison district last year after the district took three months to deny a request for a LGBTQA+101 training document provided to teachers. The case was settled and the district ultimately provided the document, according to the WILL lawsuit. The Madison school district is one of the largest in Wisconsin, and has a nearly $600 million budget. “Of those hundreds of millions of dollars, the District dedicates only one staff position to responding to record requests,” the lawsuit states. “In September of 2022, that position was vacant.”
Tim LeMonds, a school district spokesman, said in an email Tuesday that the district had not been formally notified about the lawsuit, and it does not comment on pending litigation. He added that the small instructional group document referenced by WILL is not official district policy, which is set by the school board, but is rather “a singular guidance document, the content of which was modified over a year ago.”
“Counter to WILL’s narratives, MMSD strives to create learning spacing where all students, staff and families can thrive,” LeMonds wrote. “Part of our work is to ensure our scholars have the necessary supports in place for academic and social-emotional success.”
The WILL lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Dane County Circuit Court, is calling for the district to be compelled to provide the records requested.
Cory Brewer, a WILL lawyer, said in a prepared statement that parents and community members have a right to know about the policy in question. “Race discrimination has no place in public education,” Brewer said. “It is illegal and immoral.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include comment from Tim LeMonds, a spokesman for the Madison Metropolitan School District.
