On February 14, President Trump’s Department of Education (ED) sent out a letter stating: “The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.” The letter from the ED Office of Civil Rights gave all education institutions receiving Federal financial assistance from the ED two weeks to comply or risk the “potential loss of federal funding.” In Fiscal Year 2024, Newton Public Schools (NPS) received Federal grants totaling $6,116,494 or 2% of the budget.
History of NPS Department of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
NPS established the Department of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) with Director Kathy Lopes in 2020. Hired by Superintendent David Fleishman, she began working in July of that year. (State law does not allow School Committees to approve or veto any hire other than Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent.)
The DEI Department’s focus for the 2020-2021 school year was “to provide formal and informal support to staff and students to build a foundation of awareness of racial identity, self-reflection and learning to sustain the long-term plan of dismantling harmful practices and policies.”
In 2021, an Assistant Director of Diversity was hired with COVID-related funding, the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief grant (ESSER). In the NPS FY 2025 budget, the full-time assistant director’s salary of $100,000 was moved from a Federal ESSER III Grant in the municipal budget to the NPS budget (page 49).
The mission statement of Newton’s DEI Department is to work “closely with school leaders to identify strengths and areas of growth through a lens of equity, and developing improvement strategies that will best serve each school community.” Among the Department’s work is monitoring hate speech in the schools and leading staff training. During their first five years, Newton educators are required to accumulate 15 Professional Development Points (PDP) in Anti-Racist Learning. A PDP is roughly one hour of training. The DEI Department’s annual reports can be found here.
In January 2024, Newton parent Jonathan Levin wrote an open letter in the Jewish News Service calling on NPS to “suspend all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)-related activities and lessons immediately pending investigation into DEI’s contribution to antisemitism, as well as its legality under Title VI and the U.S. Constitution.” Shortly afterward, in February, Superintendent Nolin spoke on the Greater Boston program with the Superintendents of Brookline and Needham on DEI in public schools. She said: “In my estimation, how you teach about DEI is you look at the children in the seats in your classroom, and you make sure that they can see themselves in the curriculum and that they feel comfortable enough to access the learning that is being provided. There is no secret recipe for teaching DEI. It’s not a program. It’s not something that you plop into a school district. It’s agreements among educators about how you teach in a way that reaches the most children.”
When asked what NPS could do better, Dr. Nolin replied: “We can’t assume the adults in the area have the kind of interpersonal skills to deal with a diverse society and high conflict within it and that we should be doing similar training for families and community members in order to support healthy dialogs within the community.” Needham’s superintendent Daniel Gutekanst added that public schools should be “very transparent” about what they are doing and that there should be no mystery around what the schools are doing to try and support all students.
Federal funds for NPS
Most of the Federal funds Newton receives, such as Title 1 and ESSER III, are received through the State via grants. Massachusetts Attorney General Campbell is pushing back against a related Executive Order by the Trump Administration that targets “illegal DEI and DEIA policies,” and Governor Healey has given non-specific support for keeping DEI in education. Federal funds make up only two percent of the NPS budget, while they are almost 10% of K-12 funding in the state and can be a significant part of the budget of a low-income community.