DOJ reportedly spent over $100M on DEI education programs over last four years

The Department of Justice (DOJ) spent over $100 million over the last four years on education programs related to restorative justice, social-emotional learning and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), according to a new report.

The Parents Defending Education (PDE), a right-learning organization aiming to “reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas,” released its latest findings Thursday. The report found the DOJ awarded and distributed $100,113,942 in grants to over 900 school districts across 36 states between 2021 and 2024.

According to the report, which was first reported by the Daily Wire, the DOJ spent $45,207,178 on “project proposals that broadly mention restorative practices or social emotional learning,” $32,084,529 spent on “proposals that discuss diversity, equity, or inclusion or explicitly explain how the project is intended to improve outcomes for a specific demographic group” and $19,881,347 spent on certification for consultants that “often promote divisive concepts such as critical race theory, critical gender theory and queer theory.”

Another $10,296,100 was spent on proposals on hiring new administrators, including a “restorative justice facilitator.”

Some highlights included nearly $2 million being given to the Minnesota Department of Education to “create safe learning environments where practices of anti-racism and anti-oppression are embedded” and nearly $1 million given to New Jersey’s Ocean County to reduce violence while equating “teasing” to “oppression and all forms of violence.”

The report also highlighted the DOJ’s STOP School Violence Program, which the group warned aimed to “improve school climate” by switching from disciplinary actions to “social emotional learning.”

“More often than not, when schools mention ‘improving school climate’ they mean replacing exclusionary discipline with restorative practices and social-emotional learning,” PDE wrote. 

It continued, “Exclusionary discipline removes the disruptor from the classroom, allowing the rest of the class to continue learning. Restorative practices, on the other hand, often disrupts class time for more students, as both the offender(s) and victim(s) in an incident are brought together to discuss what happened and ‘repair harm.’”

The PDE clarified that the numbers were only based on available data with some counties with multiple grants being counted only once, saying the real number “is likely much higher.”

“Although the Biden Administration claimed they cared about ‘student safety,’ these grants highlight that at the end of the day, federal bureaucrats made a deliberate choice to prioritize ideology and pet projects over protecting American schoolchildren, using the tax dollars of hardworking citizens,” PDE founder and president Nicole Neily told Fox News Digital.

Fox News Digital reached out to the DOJ for comment.

Last month, PDE released a similar report that found the Department of Education was spending over $1 billion on grants advancing DEI in hiring, programming and mental health training in America’s schools since 2021.

According to the report, $489,883,797 was spent on grants for race-based hiring; $343,337,286 went toward general DEI programming; and $169,301,221 went to DEI-based mental health training and programming, totaling $1,002,522,304.81 spent in all.