Defending Ed Files Civil Rights Complaint Against Cherry Creek School District for Race Discrimination in Employment

On October 26, 2026, Defending Education filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against Cherry Creek Schools in Colorado, a district of 66 schools and more than 52,000 students. The complaint alleges that the district is discriminating on the basis of race in employment in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

At issue is Policy 4109, an “Educators of Color Declaration” the district approved in June 2023 and included in its 2026-2027 Negotiated Agreement with the teachers’ union. In it, the district and the union “share a commitment to ensuring the District’s professional workforce represents and reflects the rich racial and ethnic diversity of its students and their families.” Both parties “commit to the intentional recruitment of highly qualified educators of color” and pledge to “make a significant and concerted effort to retain educators of color currently employed by the district and facilitate their advancement within the District and the Association’s leadership.” The policy further directs that all negotiations be “ground[ed]…in diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

In short, the district has committed itself to recruiting, retaining, and promoting teachers based on their race—and, necessarily, to disadvantaging other candidates based on theirs. As the Supreme Court explained in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in “zero-sum” settings like hiring and promotion, using race as a factor inevitably penalizes those who do not check the preferred box.

Cherry Creek elsewhere professes to follow equal-employment-opportunity principles, but as the complaint notes, a boilerplate clause that “merely restates already-existing” anti-discrimination rules “cannot substantively operate to save” an otherwise race-discriminatory policy. The Constitution does not tolerate “racial balance[ing],” and it certainly does not require a district to adjust its teacher demographics until they “reflect the racial composition of the school system as a whole.” A discriminatory policy remains a continuing violation for as long as it stays on the books.

Defending Education asks the Department to investigate Cherry Creek Schools for violations of Title VI and the Equal Protection Clause.

Read the full complaint here: