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A Georgia public school district quietly scrubbed its website and altered race-based policies to evade a sweeping federal crackdown on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, a new watchdog report alleges.
The report, released by the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI), details how the City Schools of Decatur (CSD) district allegedly “embedded racially discriminatory” DEI ideology throughout its teacher training and curriculum, only to hide the evidence when federal funding was threatened.
According to DFI, the small school district located just outside of Atlanta spent millions between 2017 and 2024 on DEI initiatives, staff salaries, and race-focused training.
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According to a new watchdog report, a public school in Georgia allegedly wiped its website and changed race-based policies to avoid a sweeping federal crackdown on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. (getty)
“City Schools of Decatur went to great lengths to enact a racially discriminatory agenda and then hide its unlawful behavior from federal oversight,” Paul Zimmerman, Senior Counsel for Policy and Regulatory at DFI, told Digital.
“Records show that district leaders were obsessed with racial ‘equity’—to the tune of spending more than $2 million on it—at the expense of actual fairness,” Zimmerman added. “Training teachers to ‘decolonize’ the curriculum and to blame achievement gaps on white supremacy is totally unhelpful to the mission of educating students.”
The report cited a Decaturish report stating CSD “spent about $1.8 million on salaries for equity department staff between 2017 and 2024.”
The report alleges that CSD trained teachers and administrators using “Beyond Diversity” seminars and “Courageous Conversations About Race” frameworks, which critics say blamed “whiteness” for racial disparities in schools and broader society.
Further findings from the DFI watchdog report show that administrators actively worked to reduce “Eurocentric” emphasis in the curriculum.
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo)
According to the report, “‘Organizing district infrastructure for racial equity’ included requiring educators to ‘recognize that many aspects of curriculum and instruction are historically based in Eurocentric principles and content . . . and build the organizational capacity, skills, and competencies to decolonize curriculum and praxis, diversifying content to perpetuate a just, humane, and democratic society that enables all students to be safe, seen, and successful.’”
“The CSD equity database contains a vast array of resources relating to training educators and teaching students that white supremacy pervades America’s schools and that ‘whiteness’ and ‘eurocentrism’ must be decentered from their learning,” DFI found.
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The district developed the Justice, Action, Diversity, and Equity program, framing it as an anti-racism and social justice course specifically for middle school students.
Equity teams were established in every school, appointing “anti-racist” leaders who allegedly pressured colleagues to center race in all instructional decisions.
The district’s open promotion of its race-centric agenda ground to a halt following strict enforcement measures enacted by the Trump administration against school systems operating allegedly discriminatory DEI offices under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Facing federal directives to prove they were not engaging in racially discriminatory practices, CSD officials took the policies down from public view, the report alleges. DFI discovered that “Equity @ CSD”—an online database of the district’s DEI and Critical Race Theory (CRT)–focused resources—vanished from the website, alongside references to the equity department itself.
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Education secretary Linda McMahon. (Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In April 2025, the school board formally rescinded its equity policy to comply with federal standards. However, comments from district leadership suggest the changes were purely cosmetic. During a school board meeting, the board’s vice chairman noted that the policy’s removal was “not stopping us from doing the work—it’s stopping us from using the words.”
“When the U.S. Department of Education began requiring school districts to comply with federal civil rights law, CSD did not abandon its discriminatory DEI agenda,” DFI reported. “Instead, the district briefly rescinded equity-related policies, later reinstated them, and quietly removed or sanitized race-based materials from its website.”
CSD did not respond to Digital’s requests for comment.
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