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A Georgia public school district has quietly overhauled its website and changed race-based policies to avoid a statewide collapse of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, a new watchdog report says.
The report, released by the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI), describes how the Decatur City School District (CSD) allegedly “embedded the DEI of racism” in all teacher training and curriculum, only to hide the evidence when federal funding was threatened.
According to DFI, the small school district just outside of Atlanta spent millions between 2017 and 2024 on DEI programs, employee salaries, and race-focused training.
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According to a new watchdog report, a public school in Georgia allegedly deleted its website and changed policies based on race to avoid serious abuse of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. (Getty)
“Decatur City Schools went to great lengths to create a racist system and then hide their illegal behavior from federal oversight,” Paul Zimmerman, DFI’s Senior Policy and Regulatory Advisor, told Fox News Digital.
“Records show that district leaders have focused on racial ‘equality’ — to the point of spending more than $2 billion on it — at the expense of real justice,” Zimmerman said. “Training teachers to ‘decolonize’ the curriculum and blaming success gaps on white administration is not helpful in educating students.”
The report cited a Decaturish report that said CSD “spent approximately $1.8 million on equity department employee salaries between 2017 and 2024.”
The report alleges that CSD has trained teachers and administrators using “Beyond Diversity” conferences and “Courageous Conversations About Race” frameworks, which critics say blame “whiteness” for racial segregation in schools and society at large.
Some of the findings of the DFI watchdog report show that regulators have worked hard to reduce the “Eurocentric” emphasis on the curriculum.
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo)
According to the report, “‘Designing the district’s infrastructure for racial equity’ includes requiring teachers to ‘recognize that many aspects of curriculum and instruction are historically based on Eurocentric values and content … making all students safe, seen and successful.’
“The Equality CSD website contains many resources related to training teachers and teaching students that white supremacy permeates American schools and that ‘whiteness’ and ‘eurocentrism’ must be embedded in their learning,” DFI found.
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The district developed a justice, action, diversity, and equity program, framing it as an anti-racism and social justice curriculum specifically for middle school students.
Equality groups were established in every school, appointing “anti-racism” leaders who were said to be pressuring their colleagues to mainstream race into all teaching decisions.
The district’s open promotion of its integration-focused agenda has come to a halt following tough enforcement actions imposed by the Trump administration against school systems operated by DEI offices that are allegedly discriminatory under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Faced with federal directives to prove they were not involved in racist practices, CSD officials relaxed policies in the community, the report said. DFI discovered that “Equity @ CSD”—the regional DEI’s online archive and Critical Race Theory (CRT)—focused resources—disappeared from the website, along with 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 officially withdrew its equity policy to conform to federal standards. However, the comments of the district leadership suggest that these changes were not positive. During a school board meeting, the board’s vice chair noted that removing the policy “doesn’t stop us from doing the job—it stops us from using the words.”
“When the US Department of Education began requiring school districts to comply with civil rights law, CSD did not abandon the discriminatory DEI,” DFI reported. “Instead, the district briefly withdrew policies related to equity, later reinstated them, and removed or purged race-based material from its website.”
CSD did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
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