The Liberty Justice Center, a Chicago-based non-profit public interest law firm, has put a suburban school district on notice, warning of lawsuits should the district’s new “equity statement” translate into actions that violate the rights of the district’s school and staff.
Earlier this year, the Hinsdale High School District 86 adopted a so-called “equity statement.”
The district includes a swath of comparatively wealthy communities in Chicago’s western suburbs, including Hinsdale, Oak Brook, Willowbrook and Burr Ridge, among others. The district operates two campuses, Hinsdale Central and Hinsdale South high schools, which collectively educate more than 4,000 students.
Hinsdale District 86 Superintendent Tammy Prentiss
| Hinsdale District 86
Under the equity statement, which is posted to the district’s website, the district committed to pursue policies and implement curriculum and programs that ”proactively work to eliminate opportunity and achievement gaps, ensure success for all students by identifying and addressing personal and institutional bias and barriers, and provide strategies to ensure students of all races and cultures have equitable access to diverse educators, rigorous instruction, rich learning opportunities, social/emotional, academic and community supports, and resources to ensure success.”
Among other goals, the statement purports to commit the school district to “designing and implementing a culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogy that interrupts racism and other systems of oppression and allows all students to see themselves in their schooling.”
The statement would also shape district hiring practices, as the district committed to “recruiting, hiring, and retaining a diverse staff that more closely reflects the school community in terms of race, cultural background, linguistic skill, physical abilities and disabilities, sex, and sexual and gender identity … across all employee groups.”
Further, the district would distribute “resources … equally across the district” by “utilizing an equity lens.”
In April, Patrick Hughes, a Hinsdale resident and president and co-founder of the Liberty Justice Center, sent a letter to District 86 administration, expressing concerns about the potential real-world application of the goals laid out in the equity statement. Further, Hughes threatened legal action should the district’s goals “lead to violations of students’ and teachers’ constitutional rights.”
“It is hard to catalogue the variety of ways this theory of equity undermines fundamental guarantees of equal treatment and equal protection under American and Illinois law,” Hughes wrote in the letter.
Hughes said the equity statement “creates serious legal and constitutional issues by wholesale incorporating critical theory into our schools.”
He noted the statement’s commitment to creating “equality of outcomes” for students, a concept Hughes said is “antithetical to the American notion of opportunity for all.”
“By promising ‘equality of outcomes’ for students, Hinsdale District 86 exposes itself to reverse discrimination litigation by students whose learning opportunities are limited downward to achieve a false equality from low expectations,” Hughes wrote.
He asserted programs and policies implemented under the equity statement could trespass upon the rights of students to equal protection, by “extending special privileges to students based on race, or limiting leadership opportunities or access to extracurricular activities based on race.”
Hughes drew attention to the possibility that the goals of the equity statement could be used to compel students and teachers to “say or affirm” a “statement which they do not believe to be true or appropriate.”
Further, he warned the statement could be used to establish a hostile work and learning environment in which students and teachers are called “racists” or in which administrators, educators or trainers use “other language that is offensive to a reasonable person.”
In the letter, Hughes urged District 86 to retract the statement and instead “adopt a better, more inclusive and respectful approach to civics education grounded in the values of this nation.”
He said the Liberty Justice Center “stands ready to represent any teacher, taxpayer, or student who is compelled to violate their beliefs or endure racial discrimination.”
The Liberty Justice Center specializes in lawsuits against public institutions for violating individual liberty, and particularly, free speech rights.
A spokesperson for the Liberty Justice Center declined to answer a question from the Cook County Record whether the LJC had yet begun talking with any Hinsdale high school students, families or staff wishing to bring such a lawsuit.
The LJC spokesperson said the organization has received no response from the district to Hughes’ letter.
Hinsdale District 86 Superintendent Tammy Prentiss did not reply to an email from the Cook County Record, offering her the opportunity to both explain the equity statement and how the district would implement the goals laid out in the statement, and to respond to the assertions contained in Hughes’ letter.