Colorado school investigated by Dept. of Education after complaints of racially discriminatory programming

The Cherry Creek School District is now under the spotlight of the U.S. Department of Education, following multiple complaints alleging the district has been sponsoring a wide range of racially discriminatory programming.

"That should never be your child or family's experience in education," Lori Gimelshtyn said, whose two children attended the Cherry Creek School District.

Gimelshtyn is the Executive Director of the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network, the group responsible for raising these complaints.

"This is not just complaints coming in from white families, this is complaints coming in from teachers and families of every race, saying this is unbelievable what they're doing," she said. "This is unbelievable, what they're forcing us to do."

These complaints were submitted to the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in February and in June this year. Allegations claim students and parents of color are being granted preferential treatment and access to district administration through a district committee called Voices of Color. 

According to the Cherry Creek Schools website, The Voices of Color Committee [formerly District P.A.S.S. (Partnerships for Academically Successful Students] is comprised of parents, Cherry Creek Schools teachers and administrators, and community members. 

Our goal is to foster an inclusive and safe environment to support the success of students of color. We do this by:

• Engaging community members in meaningful and effective partnerships
• Building relationships between schools and family communities
• Providing parents and guardians of students of color voice and direct access to the administration

The U.S. Department of Education states on its website, "Complaints further allege that the District promoted a training program for educators entitled 'Transformational Equity Experience: To Be Seen. To Belong. To Be Whole,' which teaches that the United States was founded on 'white supremacy' and categorizes individuals as 'oppressors' and 'oppressed' based only on their skin color, not their individual decisions and actions."

"My child in eighth grade had an assignment. Why is your favorite hobby racist?" said Gimelshtyn. "[He] was given words that he had to use in the rubric, like anti-racist segregationist for an English honors assignment. [It] was just heartbreaking to see my little boy, who has friends of every color, start to see himself as a bad person; he genuinely, genuinely believed that he was oppressing his friends because of what they were teaching him in school."

Reports also allege that the district requires teachers to consider race when assigning classes and to provide differing levels of academic support based on race. OCR will now have to determine whether the District violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating on the basis of race.  

A spokesperson for Cherry Creek School District responded to the investigation with a statement to CBS Colorado:

"We strongly disagree with the characterization of district programming. The district has not yet received a copy of the complaint. Without the complaint, we are not in a position to respond further."

"That's not the way our school system should be working," said Michael Hancock, a parent of former students in the district, who, although he shares a name with the former mayor of Denver, is not. 

Hancock says the district should be prioritizing education that sets students up for success rather than promoting ideas that are divisive.

"That? They should be working to teach our kids that you know, you grow up here in America, a place founded on the principle that all people, all men, all humans are created equal, and so the school seems to have drifted far away from that," Hancock said. "More than anything else in the school setting with kids, what that ultimately ends up doing is dividing the kids, making one side take us a side against the other, so I don't see the real benefit in it at all."

"What it is doing is it's planting seeds that aren't true. These things are not happening at a scale that requires hundreds of dollars of taxpayer money to be funneled into professional development when our kids can't even read or do math," said Gimelshtyn. 

According to the most recent Colorado Measures of Academic Success scores, CMAS 2024-2025, 48.2% of students in Cherry Creek Schools met or exceeded expectations in English Language Arts, compared with the average across Colorado of 44.8%. For the same CMAS testing year, 49% of high school students in Cherry Creek Schools were ranked proficient in math. 

"The school district gets focused back on those things to help our kids become critical thinkers, reading, writing, and arithmetic, and it's literally that's that, that simple," said Hancock.