The Wempner family felt like prisoners as they sat in their home in June.
The kindling for what was shaping up to be their small town’s political eruption started two years ago with a documented act of racism directed at their family.
“I’m honestly trying to decide whether I should put bullets in my pistols and have them handy,” said Dan Wempner.
In 2020, the family had pushed for the school district to respond after Amy Wempner discovered racist Snapchat messages about her adopted son Armond, one of five Black students at Kiel high school in Wisconsin. When the school district brought on a consulting firm to conduct training about racism and harassment, white parents accused the firm of advancing critical race theory. That movement flipped the school board from liberal-leaning to conservative and prompted Armond to transfer to another school district.
What pushed the town to the edge in June was a viral, one-sided story shared by parents of three middle school boys and a conservative law firm. The narrative they put forward claimed that the Kiel school district was investigating the boys for using “she” pronouns to address a transgender student who used “they/them”. (The student’s side of the story has yet to be revealed to the public, though a parent later acknowledged one boy threw food at the student.)
A series of bomb threats targeting schools, the public library, and all roads in and out of town over nine days paralyzed the local government and ended the school year early. Those behind the threats demanded the school drop the investigation by 3 June or face additional threats. On 2 June, school board members emerged from a closed meeting to pronounce the investigation “closed” in an unsigned letter.
By then, Kiel’s political factions had already clashed over the direction of schools, public libraries and even the local farmer’s market. Neighbors had grown suspicious of neighbors. Residents peeked out of windows; few ventured into the streets of this north-eastern Wisconsin town of 4,000.
The town’s turmoil offers an extreme example of what can happen when partisan misinformation aggravates the resentment and distrust already festering within a deeply divided battleground state.
The debate that consumed the town for two years and culminated in threats of violence illustrates how a Republican strategy to mischaracterize discussions of race and gender as political indoctrination can prevent schools from protecting students from documented acts of racism and bullying.
The culture wars that have raged in cities across the county have intersected in schools, turning typically sleepy school board meetings into eruptions of aggression. Outrage politics have steadily seeped into campaigns for those running for public office – and the rhetoric is only escalating ahead of midterm elections.
In Wisconsin, education issues have loomed large in a gubernatorial race that pits the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, against a Trump-backed challenger, Tim Michels. The high-stakes race could unseat Evers, whose veto pen has been a backstop to proposals put forward by a Republican-controlled legislature – including a bill that aimed to ban teachers from referencing “critical race theory”, an advanced academic concept that Republicans have branded a catch-all for inclusivity efforts.
In Kiel, as police hunted for whoever was threatening to blow up the city, the Wempners feared violence could strike.
By October, the family had filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Kiel school district of violating Armond’s civil rights by failing to appropriately address racial hostility.
***
Armond Wempner had shuffled between foster homes until Amy and Dan – both of whom are white – adopted him in 2018. He gained three younger siblings and soon called Amy “Mom”. Despite being among the few Black students in a 94% white city, he didn’t feel like an outsider. His athletic talent cast him as a rising football star in a community that swelled with pride for its Kiel high Raiders. As a linebacker, he would sack a quarterback five times in a game, the second-most in state history.
“I just wanted to put Kiel in the spotlight,” Armond said. “To show people that just because we’re a small town, that doesn’t mean we can’t produce athletes.”
Armond’s personality made him equally magnetic off the field, his mom said. When Amy led Sunday school classes, Armond helped. When a young fan took a shine to him, Armond showed him around the football field after games.
But shortly after Armond moved to town, he and Dan listened as the teenager’s basketball teammates told racist jokes about Black people during a tournament trip. The coach did nothing to stop it, they recall. In 2019, a white football player said the N-word during class, according to the Wempners’ legal complaint, filed in the US district court for the eastern district of Wisconsin. A teacher reported the slur, prompting the school to suspend the student from games. A group of students campaigned to “free” the football player from suspension, according to a lawsuit filed in October.
A teacher separately documented an incident in which several middle school boys cornered Armond’s younger brother, who has autism, and forced him to utter the N-word.
Armond initially shrugged off the racism. “You just kind of go along with it and laugh it off, otherwise you’re the bad guy,” said Armond, now 18.
In July 2020, Amy discovered that Armond’s football teammates had shared messages in a Snapchat group that described Armond as a criminal because of his skin color. She took the messages to the football coach, the school’s athletic director and Brad Ebert, the district’s superintendent, who declined to comment for this story.
Ebert initially downplayed the messages, Amy said. But by August 2020, he had acknowledged in a letter that unlawful racial harassment occurred. Elisabeth Lambert, an ACLU attorney, helped Amy negotiate an out-of-court settlement in which the district agreed to hire an outside consultant to educate staff and students about responding to racism and harassment.
The response from Kiel’s school district fit a pattern playing out across Wisconsin, said Lambert, who has represented families facing racial discrimination in Chippewa Falls, Cedarburg, Greendale, Oshkosh and Burlington – small to mid-sized school districts with majority-white populations.
In response to formal complaints of racial harassment, school districts are legally obligated to investigate the allegations. But that’s one area where school districts are falling short, Lambert said. “Many districts have taken an approach to the investigation that’s more focused on dismissing or controverting the allegations as opposed to actually developing necessary facts and fully exploring the case.”
Partisan attacks citing critical race theory only complicate attempts to address documented racism in schools, she said.
Some Kiel parents reacted with outrage to discussions about diversity after multiple families of color in the district complained about harassment. But groups of white, conservative parents cast their children as victims of a reverse-racist plot to reshape Kiel using critical race theory.
Anti-CRT parents flooded social media with misleading information. They pressured the school district to stop working with the firm it brought on for anti-racism training under the settlement, Great Lakes Equity Center.
“People who are in that kind of anti-CRT camp will try to tar my clients or me as Marxist agitators who have got some sort of ulterior motive to corrupt kids and bring in curriculum or ways of teaching that that they think are inappropriate,” Lambert said. “We’re trying to help kids, and this culture war pushback is happening.”
Brandon Gibbs, a parent of two district students, accused the firm of advancing CRT, citing statements about anti-racism on its website. Neither he nor the firm responded to requests for comment. Gibbs helped organize a grassroots group called Tri-County Citizens. Its original mission: to keep critical race theory out of Kiel. Assisting Gibbs was another local man named Ryan Harden, who had separately started an online “patriot community” where, after vetting and a $40 background-check fee, members can help “United States Citizens prepare for, and fix the decay of America”.
Groups organized by Gibbs and Harden touted nationalistic, Judeo-Christian values while criticizing movements for racial equity and LGBTQ+ rights. They would later spread misinformation about pornography in the public library in an attempt to restrict access to materials; in question was an illustrated LGBTQ+-friendly children’s book. The anti-CRT movement also spurred like-minded residents to attend school board meetings, pass out flyers, knock on doors and spread their views in the local newspaper. The groups launched campaigns for three candidates who ran on anti-CRT platforms – even creating a political action committee to fund challengers’ campaigns.
Facing outrage, the board halted work with Great Lakes Equity Center and delayed implementing the Wempner settlement agreement.
The weaponization of CRT had worked – making a faction in Kiel more concerned about a manufactured threat than the documented bullying of a Black student.
Feeling increasingly uncomfortable in Kiel high school, Armond transferred in 2020 to the more diverse Fond du Lac high school, a 90-minute round trip from home. That year, Armond successfully lobbied the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association to waive the requirement that he miss a year of varsity sports due to the transfer.
“I have worked so hard in Kiel to earn my positions on the varsity squads,” he wrote in his request. “Please don’t make me sacrifice even more in order to go to a school that doesn’t single me out based on my race.”
***
In Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a bill in early 2022 prohibiting educators from referencing concepts including “critical race theory”, “multiculturalism”, “equity” and “social justice”, before Evers, the Democratic governor, vetoed it.
At least five Wisconsin school districts have adopted anti-CRT measures – from the tiny northern city of Mellen to the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha.
Evers’ Republican challenger, Tim Michels, has frequently called for schools to teach more “ABCs and less CRT”, adopting a popular party talking point, and has described his opponent as trying to use public schools to indoctrinate small children with “radical gender ideology”.
The same combative talking points were echoed by conservative school board members in Kiel, including the longtime school board member Randy Olm, now the board’s president.
From the outset, Olm opposed the anti-racism curriculum required by the Wempners’ settlement, arguing that it sounded Marxist.
“I don’t like the ‘programming’ word or the ‘restorative practices’. It sounds like re-education to me,” Olm said during a 2021 board meeting. “As the CRT stuff is being discussed, I would argue that putting a group of kids in the corner and telling them you’re the oppressed group – that’s programming.”
In a letter to the community, Olm acknowledged an “increased amount of racial and ethnic intimidation in our schools” but warned about the dangers of CRT – lamenting that the school board did not approve the curriculum changes required of the settlement that Ebert signed.
“We have effectively lost local control to determine how and what we’ll be teaching our students,” he wrote before endorsing the three insurgent school board candidates.
Olm, who did not respond to requests for comment, repeatedly downplayed the relevance of discussing racial identities with students, saying he has family members of color who have “grown up pretty white”.
“Don’t worry. I know how you feel. I have mixed race in my family, too,” Olm told Amy and Dan Wempner during a break at one board meeting – an exchange that another school board member confirmed.
The three school board challengers narrowly won election in April 2022.
***
In August, after the threats ceased and life in Kiel resumed its typical rhythms, in a 6-1 vote the school board approved the anti-racism curriculum required as a result of the Wempners’ settlement in what members called a compromise – seven months after its initial deadline to approve the curriculum.
Members of the Tri-County Citizens were allowed to change language considered too controversial. Scrutinized were references to “microaggressions”, “power structures” and even the “talking circles” used for class discussion.
Mike Joas, a newly elected, anti-CRT board member, acknowledged a growing bullying problem in the district, but he doubted that racism was driving the trend. “Yes, probably some students, because they’re colored or whatever, they are getting picked out,” he said, urging the district to emphasize treating each other better “instead of trying to divide people”.
Dan Meyer, a longtime Kiel school board member, said claims that the Great Lakes Equity Center would bring CRT into Kiel schools proved untrue, and he regrets halting work with the firm.
Stuart Long, another veteran school board member, said he was saddened because “the whole reason for the new curriculum – bullying and harassment – has been completely lost on the community”.
Amy Wempner accuses the district of failing to uphold its settlement commitments.
“Our intent was to make the school a safer place for our children and other children of color and to make them feel like they belonged. And I do not feel like we’re any closer to that. In fact, I feel like we’re further away,” she said.
Armond said he was glad to have transferred to Fond du Lac high school, where he felt more at home in class and on the football team. He said: “It finally felt more like a family.”
His high school graduation ceremony in June was a proud day for the Wempners. “After all Armond’s been through, to see him graduate was a special moment. He’s the most resilient human you’ll ever meet,” Amy said.
Armond is now putting high school in the rearview mirror. He’s working a job in Kiel and visits his parents for Wednesday-night suppers. He doesn’t want people to see him as a victim. He just wants to ensure that his younger siblings, who are all children of color, don’t face what he did.
As he looks back on Kiel’s two years of turmoil that started with something that happened to him, Armond said it never felt like the conversation was about him. “It didn’t even have anything to do with kids,” he said. “It was just about the adults.”
A version of this story was originally published by Wisconsin Watch. The non-profit Wisconsin Watch collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.
