The News: WILL filed a new federal complaint against the Jefferson County Public School District (JCPS) in Louisville, Kentucky, after discovering a race-based funding scheme that allocates funds to students based on the color of their skin. WILL’s complaint, filed on behalf of a Kentucky family with current and former students in the district, alleges that JCPS has explicitly prioritized students based on race since at least 2018. WILL filed the complaint with the U.S. Department of Education and called on the Department to enforce federal law and President Trump’s executive orders requiring agencies to root out DEI from public schools.
The Quotes: WILL Associate Counsel, Lauren Greuel, stated, “JCPS is spending millions of taxpayer dollars on racism. Based on our findings, the district allocates additional resources to certain students and schools based on skin color alone. The Trump Administration needs to fully investigates this unlawful, race-based approach.”
WILL Client, Miranda Stovall, stated, “Parents need to see what’s happening with their children and their tax dollars. A child’s race should never determine their value, yet this is the message JCPS is sending to every student in the district––including my own. This practice is unlawful, immoral, and harms every student in the district.”
Additional Background: JCPS allocated more than $35 million in “Racial Equity Funding” for the 2024–25 school year alone, which provides certain schools with hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional funding based on their percentage of students of color. This includes discretionary funds that allocate an additional $1,000 to $1,500 per pupil for minority students simply because of their race.
The district’s own documents show that a school with 80% students of color receives nearly $200,000 in additional funding, while schools with the majority white populations are excluded. This funding structure is not the only discriminatory policy, as the district has also pledged to “increase the diversity of the school and District staff to more closely reflect the racial, ethnic, and linguistic make-up of the District’s student population.”
Additionally, during WILL’s investigation, whistleblowers employed by the school district shared instructional materials explicitly calling for an exclusion of elements of “white” culture. One document, titled “Affirming Racial Equity Tools” (ARE), explicitly describes “‘diverse’” as “pertaining to any and all cultures that are NOT heterosexual, male-centered, white, Western, and/or Christian.”
In a similar document they discuss the need for instructional materials and professional development to be revised to “[a]dopt high-quality instructional resources and develop professional learning for school staff in alignment with Kentucky Academic Standards to implement that more effectively and accurately include the contributions and historical relevance of African-American, Latinx, Asian-American, and other non-White cultures; the experiences of People of Color; and the history of immigration, indigenous peoples, and ethnic diasporas and their impact on U.S. history, culture, and society.”
Our Call to Action: WILL is hopeful that the Department of Education launches a Title VI investigation into the JCPS district and that the school district ultimately removes ALL race-based policies, practices, and funding schemes to align with the principle of true equality set forth in the Constitution, as well as the President’s executive orders issued earlier this year to end race-based programs within the federal government and beyond.
WILL’s Equality Under the Law Project: Since 2021, WILL attorneys have represented over 80 clients in 25 states as part of its Equality Under the Law Project. So far, WILL has won seven times in court with many cases still pending.
Read more:
- Title VI Complaint, September 2025
Lauren Greuel
Associate Counsel