Donald Trump’s Department of Education has launched a civil rights investigation into Evanston-Skokie’s District 65, alleging the K–8 school district in Chicago’s leafy suburbs has “widespread policies and practices that discriminate on the basis of race.”
I reported on the fraught racial politics in this school district earlier this year, in my story “How One Town Turned a Child’s ‘Cry for Help’ Into a Hate Crime.” In the piece, I recounted what happened to two middle schoolers who district leadership labeled as hate criminals in 2022, after three nooses were found on a tree in the school playground. It turned out that the nooses had nothing to do with race. Instead, as police concluded after a monthlong investigation, they were a sign of a kid in mental distress: “a cry for help.” Still, the two children were vilified as racists. And a family was driven out of their home.