EXCLUSIVE: Ohio School District Hit With Federal Complaint Over Discriminatory Hiring Program

An Ohio school district is facing a federal complaint over a discriminatory employment program that may have illegally barred teachers from participating on the basis of their race and sex.

Parents Defending Education (PDE), a non-profit organization dedicated to opposing left-wing ideology in the education system, filed the complaint against Middletown City School District over the district’s discriminatory affinity group programming, which is open only to black male teachers.

“PDE and its members oppose racial discrimination and political indoctrination in America’s schools. Middletown City School District is offering educational and affinity group programming for Black male employees that are not offered to all employees in the District,” reads the complaint from PDE, first obtained by The Daily Wire.

The complaint comes as school districts across the country have adopted controversial diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies that often discriminate against individuals on the basis of their race and sex in attempts to diversify the staff or faculty of a given institution.

“Schools should be focused on making training and resources available to ALL teachers, not arbitrarily excluding teachers and staff based on race,” Michele Exner, Senior Advisor for Parents Defending Education, told The Daily Wire. “This is a blatant violation of employment laws and it’s why we are calling for an investigation into this program. Students and teachers deserve better than a system that chooses divisiveness over results.”

The complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission points specifically to the district’s Admiral Squad, a race and sex-based affinity group program that seeks to “address the shortage of Black males in education” and aims “to hire 25 Black male classroom teachers.”

“As the Commission is aware, ‘the important purpose of Title VII’ is ‘that the workplace be an environment free of discrimination, where race is not a barrier to opportunity,’” PDE writes in its complaint.

The complaint goes on to explain that the hiring and retention model proposed by the district also includes a number of race-based goals, such as securing a “50% increase in the number of Black male educators from 32 to 52,” “developing a diverse pipeline,” and offering a “fellowship for Black and Brown candidate student members.” The district also intends to “work with He is Me Institute, which offers a fellowship to support Black males in high school and college who are interested in becoming teachers.”

“The District has even committed to working with nearby universities to target, hire, and retain Black male classroom educators,” it adds, detailing the extent of the district’s race and sex-based recruiting and hiring operation.

A representative of the school district contended that the Admiral Squad program is compliant with federal employment law in a comment to The Daily Wire, also adding that “while the Admiral Squad is an affinity group for Black male educators, nothing is stopping a Middletown City School District educator of any other race or sex from being part of the group.”

The district representative also added that the Admiral Squad is “used as a retention and recruitment tool for current Middletown City School District educators” and “was created as a result of the fact that less than 2% of the teaching population nationwide are Black males.”

The Middletown City School District is hardly the only district that appears to be engaging in race-based discrimination, however. PDE also filed a federal complaint against Minnesota’s Rochester Public Schools after the district allegedly used funds to support affinity group programs and professional development initiatives that discriminated against white employees.

The district also boasted the “Grow Your Own” program, which intended to “increase and support the number of educators of color in our district.” The initiative’s description went on to add that the program “will support teachers/individuals of color who want to pursue a career in teaching.”

There’s also California’s La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District, which PDE hit with a federal complaint after discovering that the district set out to “achieve an increase in diversity” for new hires.

One district document outlined “strategies to encourage diverse candidates,” with another detailing the district’s goal of achieving “an increase in the diversity of the workforce in at least 75% of new hires.”