Jefferson County Public Schools is no longer updating the U.S. Department of Education on reforms to correct inequities in student discipline identified in a sweeping, decade-long federal investigation, records show.
The district agreed in September 2024 to send regular reports to the education department in order to resolve the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights investigation that found JCPS school staff disciplined Black students at higher rates than their white peers and leveled harsher punishments for similar infractions.
The two-year agreement called for monitoring of district data and policy changes through at least December 2026, but federal education officials stopped responding to JCPS when U.S. President Donald Trump took office. After several months without communication from OCR, JCPS decided to stop sending along the reports and data required by the 2024 agreement.
Emails obtained by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting show federal education officials stopped responding to JCPS staff in January 2025 and did not acknowledge receipt of required monitoring reports and data in February and March.
Near the end of March, JCPS attorney Dana Collins emailed to say the district did not plan to submit any more information until they heard back from OCR.
They never did.
JCPS did not grant an interview with KyCIR to discuss the resolution agreement.
Asked by email whether the district is still compiling the data and reports outlined in the agreement, JCPS spokesperson Carolyn Callahan said the district “has been collecting the requested data for many years.”
Callahan said JCPS was “already taking the actions [OCR] required,” such as revisions to the student handbook.
“However we are not reporting these actions to OCR because we don't know if the investigators in charge of our case are still employed by OCR,” she wrote.
National reporting shows that after Trump took office, his administration gutted OCR and its regional offices through mass layoffs, and prohibited employees from communicating with anyone outside the department. OCR investigates allegations of racial and gender discrimination, sexual harassment and mistreatment of students with disabilities.
Retired JCPS principal and Louisville NAACP education chair Michelle Pennix called the U.S. Department of Education’s pivot away from monitoring for racial discrimination in discipline "extremely disappointing and worrisome.”
“No one's checking, no one's asking the questions,” Pennix told KyCIR.
The lack of federal oversight, Pennix said, “makes it even more pressing” that local school systems prioritize reforms on their own.
The most recent data shows Black JCPS students are disciplined far more frequently than white students, and that the disproportionality is virtually unchanged since the 2017-2018 school year.
In the 2024-2025 school year alone, administrators gave Black students 14,224 out-of-school suspensions. White students received 4,229. JCPS’ overall enrollment is about 36% Black and 33% white.
Opposite OCR agendas
Despite failing to provide the regular feedback and monitoring outlined in the 2024 resolution agreement, federal education officials mentioned the agreement in their decision to withhold a $9.7 million grant to support JCPS magnet programs.
In a July 2025 letter, first reported by the Courier Journal, then-OCR Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said JCPS’s racial equity policies illegally use race as a factor in decisions around funding, curriculum and discipline. Trainor suggested the district’s racial equity policies discourage staff from disciplining Black students who should be removed from the classroom.
“We appreciate that the district is currently subject to reporting requirements as part of a resolution agreement that it reached with OCR under the Biden Administration,” Trainor wrote. “But the Trump OCR will not tolerate a disease as cure.”
JCPS is appealing the OCR’s decision to withhold the magnet schools grant. In a response letter, JCPS attorney Kevin Brown said recent changes to discipline were intended to “remove subjective elements so that discipline is objective.”
“If OCR intends to dissolve the Resolution Agreement, please advise,” Brown wrote.
Asked if the district still considers itself bound by the agreement signed with former President Joe Biden’s OCR, Callahan, the district’s spokesperson, said that adherence to the 2024 agreement is “involved in a pending administrative appeal,” and declined to comment further.
The U.S. Department of Education did not grant KyCIR an interview request. In an email, a spokesperson said the case is “under review by an OCR attorney.” The spokesperson did not respond to an email asking for clarification.
‘Do they even care anymore?’
Emails obtained by KyCIR show JCPS completed the first step of the 2024 resolution agreement to the satisfaction of OCR attorneys — that was to survey students, staff and families on their perception of the climate around discipline in the district.
JCPS added four new questions to the annual Comprehensive School Survey about the perceived fairness of discipline practices.
The survey changes, workshopped with OCR in November and December 2024, were the only reform the OCR provided feedback on, despite a rigorous schedule of review by OCR outlined in the agreement through December 2026.
JCPS attorney Dana Collins continued to email federal officials for months with no response. On Jan. 10, JCPS provided a timeline for revision of the Student Support and Intervention Handbook, along with a list of dates staff would be trained on how to select the appropriate discipline for certain behaviors, especially those deemed more subjective and prone to racial bias. Staff also provided a matrix for determining the length of placements in alternative schools. That new matrix was meant to address discrepancies OCR investigators said they found in the length of placements in alternative schools between Black and white students for similar infractions.
Sarah Haake, then a senior attorney at the U.S Department of Education OCR, emailed back the same day to say OCR would review the submission and get back to JCPS. It was the last time JCPS would hear from OCR staff in the case.
Haake did not respond to a request for comment. But on LinkedIn earlier this year Haake wrote that she was among those let go from OCR’s Philadelphia regional office, which took on civil rights complaints against schools in Kentucky and four other states.
Though she never heard back from OCR staff, Collins continued to provide updates on JCPS reforms. On February 28, she provided OCR staffers Haake and Michael Branigan with a spreadsheet containing data on every disciplinary referral for the prior school year, as outlined in the resolution agreement. She also outlined a plan to give compensatory education to several Black students OCR investigators said were given overly harsh punishments relative to white students who had the same infraction.
Records show Collins disputed several of the OCR’s findings, saying the Black students OCR identified were not “similarly situated” to the white students investigators compared them to. For example, Collins said one Black student OCR determined was unfairly removed from classes for most of the school day for “talking out in class” had already been disciplined several times during the school year for fighting, leaving school and other behaviors. The white student who received a conference and schedule change for the same infraction had not previously been in trouble, Collins said.
Nonetheless, Collins said JCPS planned to give the Black student five hours and thirty minutes of compensatory education. Haake and Branigan didn’t write back.
Callahan said because they never heard back from OCR on the plan, JCPS did not move forward with providing the compensation.
On March 10, JCPS was supposed to deliver an annual report showing the district was keeping an eye on racial disparities in discipline rates. The report was to show JCPS was identifying any evidence of discrimination or inconsistent use of the handbook down to the administrator level, and show that JCPS had taken corrective actions, including additional training or sanctions against individual staff. The report was also supposed to show JCPS was providing support to students who were repeatedly disciplined.
The report JCPS submitted provides links to so-called “System 5” Plans for three schools created to “address disproportionality in behavior.”
Callahan said the System 5 plans are now referred to as the “Behavior Data Review.”
“It is a tool we provide schools to review their behavior data,” she said.
The annual report does not address how JCPS is identifying staff who overuse disciplinary referrals. Instead it shows JCPS has a “clean-up function” in its data management system that alerts administrators when there are potential errors in discipline referrals entered into the system, and prompts staff to correct them. The brief report references meetings between the Culture and Climate and Transportation Departments to discuss discipline and behavior on buses.
Pennix, the retired JCPS principal and Louisville NAACP education chair, said she’s not convinced that JCPS leadership is systematically trying to solve the disproportionate discipline of Black students.
“Are they getting into the muck of why there is such a gap between Black and white students, and do they even care anymore?” she said. “Because we know the federal government just doesn’t.”
The annual report was the last update JCPS sent OCR.
