Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to get the latest reporting from us, plus curated news from other Colorado outlets, delivered to your inbox.A conservative law firm is alleging that Denver Public Schools’ voting map was “drawn with illegal racial intent,” according to a lawsuit filed Thursday.At issue is a map adopted by the Denver school board in 2024. The seven-member board had to redraw its districts to ensure its members represented roughly the same number of residents. According to the 2020 Census, District 4 in northeast Denver had too many residents, while District 2 in southwest Denver had too few.In its lawsuit, the Virginia-based Public Interest Legal Foundation argued that “DPS intentionally and brazenly drew district boundaries to ensure Black and Latino racial majorities achieved race-based representation over Denver’s increasing White population.”White residents held a majority in three of the five regional school board districts in 2024, according to a district presentation that was attached to the lawsuit as an exhibit. Latinos made up about half the population of District 2. Black voters did not hold a majority in any district. The new map — represented in the presentation as Scenario C — didn’t change that.The lawsuit comes in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which significantly raised the bar for using racial considerations in drawing voting maps. That case involved congressional maps, but legal experts have said that the decision could have implications for school boards and other local bodies. The lawsuit claims DPS’ actions violated the Fifteenth Amendment, which says citizens can’t be denied the right to vote based on race, and the federal Voting Rights Act.The board’s new 2024 map shrunk the size of District 4 but kept the historically Black neighborhoods of Five Points and Whittier in the district, which has long been represented by a Black board member. That change slightly increased the percentage of Black residents in District 4 by .8%, according to a district presentation.The map expanded District 2, long represented by a Latino board member, by adding several neighborhoods, including Sun Valley and La Alma/Lincoln Park. But it reduced the percentage of Latino residents in District 2 by 3.25%.A DPS spokesperson said Thursday that the district “has not been able to review the lawsuit and is not able to comment at this time.” DPS is Colorado’s largest school district and serves 89,000 students, three quarters of which are students of color.The 18-page lawsuit quotes heavily from Denver school board meetings at which members discussed map options. Former board member Scott Esserman said at one meeting that “our students being represented by people that look like them is really important.” Former board president Carrie Olson said adopting the map was an act of resistance and empowerment in the face of the gentrification that has affected many Denver neighborhoods.At the time, Latino community groups and other advocates pushed the board to adopt maps they felt better represented their constituents. One proposal would have decreased Latino representation in District 2 by as much as 6.5%, setting off alarm bells in that community. The school board was responding to those concerns in part when it adopted the map it did. Board presentations from those meetings show that district officials were mindful of Voting Rights Act requirements as most people understood them before Callais. That included not diluting the votes of minority communities and drawing compact, contiguous districts.The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The aim was to give people a tool to challenge discriminatory voting maps that reduced the power of communities of color. Nationally, more than a fifth of Voting Rights Act complaints since 1982 have involved school board voting maps. Most often, activists called for the creation of regional voting districts, such as Denver has, to replace at-large school board seats. This ensured that Black and Hispanic voters concentrated in a particular part of a city could elect the representative of their choosing. But a series of court cases culminating in Callais have cast more scrutiny on maps intending to promote racial representation. Conservative legal groups, among them the Public Interest Legal Foundation, have indicated they’ll use the Callais decision to challenge both the local voting maps and state voting rights acts that are more expansive than the federal law.Public Interest Legal already has sued the state of Illinois over its state voting law. In a May interview about the implications of the Callais decision, J. Christian Adams, the president of Public Interest Legal, told Chalkbeat that open discussion of racial balancing such as what occurred in Denver was illegal in his view, especially in cases where there is no recent history of explicit voting discrimination.“Any school district that has used racial redistricting is going to be in the crosshairs,” said Adams, a former Justice Department official who served on President Donald Trump’s failed 2017 voter-fraud commission.The DPS lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court and lists Denver residents Susan Moore and Valdamar Archuleta as plaintiffs. Archuleta said he had no comment on Thursday. Archuleta ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2024 and is a member of the Log Cabin Republicans of Colorado, a group representing LGBTQ Republicans.Chalkbeat National Editor Erica Meltzer contributed to this story.Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.
