IMAGE: Courtesy Green Bay Area Public School District.
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced Wednesday it has launched a Title VI and disability-discrimination investigation into the Green Bay Area Public School District.
It’s in response to a complaint filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty after Colbey Decker, the mother of a white Green Bay elementary student, claimed her son’s civil rights were being violated by GBAPS’ literacy policy.
A news release states, “The District allegedly prioritizes special education services to students based on racial “priority groups,” a category that the student did not fall into because he is white. The complaint further alleges the District discriminated against the student on the basis of disability and failed to provide timely and adequate special education services.”
In December, Deckner described how reading can be challenging for her son, who attends King Elementary School.
“He’s in math class, he has a really hard time decoding the math story problem. He goes down the hall to music class, and he can’t read the song that we’re learning for the musical,” Decker said.
Decker says her son was diagnosed with dyslexia in 2022. They began asking for support from the school district when he enrolled in January 2024. By the fall of 2024, after repeated requests, Decker was told her son would be enrolled into an intervention program, but they were conducted in small groups, rather than individualized sessions.
Decker and WILL believe GBAPS denied Decker’s son one-on-one reading intervention resources because of his race.
The law firm pointed to a 2024-25 School Success Plan for King Elementary, which says a literacy strategy focus is “Intentional work educating our focus students, prioritizing additional resources to First Nations, Black and Hispanic students.”
WILL sent a letter to the district requesting the policy be removed and threatened a lawsuit.
In the GBAPS policy manual, its Reading Instruction Goals says its objective is to “enable the District’s educators to provide effective instruction in reading and literacy for all students, including providing timely and appropriate learning assistance to any student who may be experiencing difficulty with reading and related literacy skills.”
Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a news release, “In America, we do not ‘prioritize’ students for educational access, nor do we judge their worth, on the basis of skin color. Schools must provide special needs students access to supportive educational resources on an equal footing and on the basis of need, not on the basis of race.”
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