February 12, 2025

The following webinar, attended by nearly 100 independent school leaders on February 11, explores the implications of the Trump Administration’s Executive Orders and approach towards discrimination and DEI. In this webinar, the DC Law Firm, Arnold & Porter examines the changing nature of what constitutes illegality in the context of non-profit charitable purposes. It looks at the way the Trump administration is seeing civil rights laws, preference towards minorities, and affirmative action methods as reverse discrimination towards in particular, white people. Participants asked the following questions that were addressed:

1. What protections are there at the state level, particularly for schools in blue states? We issued bonds, can they be impacted?
2. If we don’t receive Federal assistance, are we OK?
3. The Congressional Research Service document Sanje shared relating to the illegality doctrine as regards private schools’ non-profit status being revoked by the IRS and the cases mentioned seem to say that parents have a right to ask for our nonprofit status to be revoked. Who has standing to do that and is that right?
4. Would you advise us to support lawsuits that seek to invalidate any actions by the Trump administration?
5. I am a teacher. I have been required to do a number of things by my DEI people ( attend implicit bias training, read books on CRT, support trans kids with their pronouns, not tell parents, etc., etc.). What can I do to make sure I am not being asked to do stuff that is illegal? What personal liability is there for teachers?
6. What liability do trustees have if the school is sued for illegal DEI activities?
7. Our affinity groups allow anyone to participate, but they are categorized by race or other groupings- is that an issue?
8. The CIF has decided to ignore the Trump Transgender directives. Our whole athletic program is part of the CIF. What risk do we have here?
9. Do we have to ensure our vendors are not bringing us into a problem? What happens if we attend a conference like the People of Color Conference, where there are affinity groups by race? 
10. Our accreditation has DEI standards. This includes recommendations to try and mirror the demographics of our wider community? Is that a problem from an admissions stance? What protection do we have from that?
11. We attend diversity hiring fairs and our strategic plan has a commitment to hire more people of color. Our faculty is heavily white except our DEI team that is all people of color. We track our diversity data. Please advise.

Note: Pre-registration Is open for the OESIS/NPAIS Pluralism & Purpose Conference. If you wish to come to this conference, you will need to pre-register without paying for it now; we need to get a sense of the size of the location required. It will be scheduled for the first week in December.

Sanje Ratnavale’s book examines a way forward for those looking at moving on from DEI. Meaning Loss: Reimagining DEI & Purpose. Here are reviews. One from the Head of School at Avenues World School and another from the Head of a Waldorf school. They are also in the images below. The book provides a deep curricular analysis of what went wrong and how to emerge from the predicament independent schools are now in.