Whitefish Bay settles student discrimination lawsuit

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Whitefish Bay’s school district will pay $52,500 to resolve a federal civil rights lawsuit which alleged that administrators and the school board discriminated against a Black student at the high school in 2023, according to a settlement agreement.

The settlement ends legal action surrounding claims brought by the family of the student that the administrators and board took or supported unfair disciplinary actions against him, while disregarding his own complaints of harassment.

In addition to payment, the settlement agreement requires the district to hold a reconciliation meeting with the student.

Shaneeka White, who pursued the lawsuit on behalf of her child, said the family is pleased with the amicable resolution and looking forward to a positive senior year, according to a June 25 statement from White’s attorney, Elisabeth Lambert of the Wisconsin Education Law and Policy Hub.

According to the settlement agreement, the district still denies violating any of the student’s constitutional rights.

In a statement sent to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel June 25, Superintendent Jamie Foeckler said “the district’s insurer concluded that the settlement represents the best outcome for all involved stakeholders. The district considers this matter resolved and will have no further comment.”

The family’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin on Aug. 23, 2024, had argued administrators’ actions violated the constitution’s equal protections and due process clauses under the 14th Amendment.

The settlement came shortly after United States Magistrate Judge Nancy Joseph’s April 25 decision to largely reject the district’s motion to dismiss the case.

Joseph’s decision upheld most of the lawsuit’s equal protection and due process claims against the Whitefish Bay School Board, Whitefish Bay High School Principal Amy Levek, former Assistant Principal Julie Henningsen, Middle School Principal Mike O’Connor and Associate Principal of the Middle School Matt Rose — all of whom signed onto the settlement agreement in late April and early May.

However, Joseph’s decision dismissed claims against District Superintendent John Thomsen and Special Education and Pupil Services Director Tim Lemke, who were also named as defendants in the lawsuit.

The Whitefish Bay School Board unanimously approved the settlement agreement at its May 13 meeting, according to meeting minutes.

A portion of the settlement payment will go toward the family’s attorney’s fees, and the rest will be held in a trust for the student, according to the agreement.

Here’s what the lawsuit entailed:

The lawsuit arose almost a year after an incident where the student, identified as “K.K.” in the complaint, was suspended from homecoming activities over a threat he allegedly made to fight another student at the homecoming parade.

However, the lawsuit alleged that a few White students had been harassing K.K. prior to the homecoming incident, and it accused the school administrators of ignoring several complaints of harassment made by K.K. and his mother.

When the White students reported K.K.’s actions, administrators allegedly conducted an “inadequate and biased disciplinary process that subjected K.K. to a frightening police interaction, exclusion from school activities, and a damaging, untrue report in K.K.’s disciplinary record,” according to the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, White and K.K. had encountered repeated roadblocks, dismissals and delays in reporting harassment against K.K., according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit details that harassment, which included other students posting an intimate video of K.K. on social media, mocking an injury K.K. had sustained, mocking his appearance and calling him the N-word.

After the homecoming parade altercation, an administrator, Levek, contacted police before seeking K.K.’s side of the story.

Levek told police where White’s family lives in Whitefish Bay and made comments that many of the families in that area were problematic for the school, including K.K.’s cousin who also lives in the area, according to police body camera footage of the meeting.

K.K. and White live in a neighborhood in the southwest corner of Whitefish Bay with a significantly higher proportion of Black residents than in other neighborhoods in the village, according to the suit.

The video also shows Levek telling the officer about an incident where the parents of another student made a gun threat to White at a football game.

Except when Levek mentions the incident, she seemingly implies it was White who made the gun threat.

“The police were there and there was mention of a gun in that space too,” she said in the video. “So, this is not a new family that we’ve dealt with. Certainly, there have been altercations with them before.”

In the court’s ruling largely rejecting the district’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Joseph wrote that those allegations of discrimination laid out in the lawsuit would have been sufficient to proceed with discovery.

The disciplinary actions against K.K. following the homecoming parade altercation led White to file a racial harassment complaint with the school district.

Multiple levels of administrators, and later, the school board, found that the White students’ actions did not rise to the level of “chronicity or severity” to constitute harassment, according to the board’s Feb. 27, 2024, decision on the matter. The decision determined that the parade altercation did not involve racial discrimination, and the district’s disciplinary actions against K.K. stemmed from credible safety concerns.

White appealed the decision to Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction, which reviewed the district’s investigation and found no evidence of racial discrimination against the student, according to the June 11, 2025, decision, provided by Foeckler to the Journal Sentinel.

But the DPI also found but the district had “byzantine” discrimination policies that were “confusing and nearly impossible to apply,” according to the decision.

“It is improbable that this suite of policies could have ever led to any meaningful review of discrimination and harassment complaints,” the decision said.

It also said the district undertook a self-imposed corrective action plan, which involved updating its discrimination policies. Those updates were adopted by the school board in March of 2024.

Whitefish Bay High School consistently ranks as the top or among the top high schools in the state.

But the lawsuit argued that K.K.’s treatment is part of widespread and systemic ignoring of Black students’ complaints about misconduct, while acting assertively on White students’ complaints about Black students.

Whitefish Bay High School’s population of Black students has hovered near 7% since 2018, according to Wisconsin’s DPI.

Yet, the district suspended Black students from school at a rate nearly 14 times the rate at which it suspended White students, according to DPI data from the 2020-2021 school year cited in the lawsuit.