(The Center Square) – The Des Moines Public School System is the latest to be investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for alleged discriminatory hiring practices.
The investigation was launched after DMPS’ former superintendent was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement late last month and after its board chair has a lengthy history of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion “DEI” policies.
In 2023, DMPS hired Guyanan national Ian Andre Roberts after he’d been living in the U.S. illegally without federal work authorization and had an extensive criminal history dating to 1996, The Center Square reported.
The district’s stated 2021 Affirmative Action plan prioritizes “diversity, inclusion, and equity” as “fundamental and essential” to the district’s success.
The plan’s stated goal is to increase hiring the number of teachers of color by specific grades and percentages, including hiring teachers of color in kindergarten and first grade by 8%, and in second through fifth grades by 5%.
It also prioritizes recruiting and hiring teachers who completed a “Blue Contract” program and who received an advanced degree in Culturally Responsive Leadership and Instruction. They receive a higher starting salary than non-BLUE contract teachers, according to the plan, The Center Square reported. The district also created a 3D Coalition project to identify aspiring minority teachers to recruit and hire. It also created a “staff retention strategy” to “review and revise how we place our teachers and leaders of color,” “lift up voices of our People of Color” and create “a safer environment for People of Color.”
Within days of Roberts’ arrest, the DOJ launched an investigation to determine if DMPS violated Section 707 of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing these policies.
In a letter to DMPS’s interim superintendent, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote, “DMPS May be engaged in employment practices that discriminate against employees, job applicants, and training program participants based on race, color, and national origin and violation of Title VII.”
It also cites DMPS’s Board Governance Policies that direct the superintendent to ensure the “composition of the teaching and learning staff” don’t diverge from “demographics and cultural responsivity, from the student population while utilizing hiring practices conducted in accordance with the District’s Affirmative Action Plan and Equal Employment Opportunity/Non-Discrimination Process.”
DMPS Board Chair Jackie Norris, who previously served as the former chief of staff to former First Lady Michelle Obama, says she played a “key role” in helping then presidential candidate Barack Obama win Iowa in 2008. She is currently running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat, joining a crowded race to fill outgoing U.S. Sen. Joni Earnst’s seat. Earnst, a Republican, is not running for reelection.
As president of Horizon Group, a market research and management consulting company, Norris has played a key role in advancing DEI policies. Horizon Group provides services for DSM 4 Equity, a collective of 30 community members.
In 2021, Horizon Group partnered with DSM 4 Equity to increase “racial equity in Central Iowa.” It helped survey more than 200 organizations to identify “tangible strategies for improvement through the creation of equity playbooks to supporter employers,” it says. It also partnered with United Way of Central Iowa to develop a “racial equity data dashboard” to centralize data collection.
Multiple groups, including those receiving taxpayer funds, are involved in driving “measurable shifts in policy, systems and practice” related to “recruitment, retention, data collection, training” and other initiatives based on “racial equity,” through DSM 4 Equity, it says.
Prior to being rebranded as Horizon Group, the marketing and consulting company was known as the State Public Policy Group. In 2009, a U.S. Election Assistance Commission Office of Inspector General audit found that the Iowa Secretary of State paid contractors “without justification … and without proper procurement standards and requirements for full and open competition,” including the SPPG.
The audit questioned “all costs associated with these contracts. The SOS agreed to pay professional fees that it did not determine the reasonableness of and administrative fees for which it did not have certified indirect cost rate or cost allocation agreements in place.”
Questioned costs included $763,702 paid to the SPPG, including $74,764 for a “Celebrate Voting Project.” The audit concluded that federal Help America Vote Act funds “totaling $118,224 were spent on activities unrelated to voter education,” including those allocated to SPPG.
Two days after the DOJ investigation was launched into DMPS, Roberts was taken into custody by U.S. Marshalls and remains in DOJ custody, the Woodbury County Sheriff’s Office said.
