News & Commentary

The following statement was issued today by the ACLU of RI in response to the Cranston sex discrimination controversy. The issue arose when a local parent-teacher organization, with initial support from the school, organized a “father-daughter dance” for girls attending the school, and a “mother-son” outing to a Pawtucket Red Sox baseball game for the boys:

The Narragansett Town Council has tentatively agreed to resolve a lawsuit filed by the ACLU in April on behalf of three URI pharmacy graduate students who received tickets for parking their cars overnight on their street even though they had a permit to do so.

Six community and civil rights organizations have urged the Providence City Council to reject a proposal from Councilman Davian Sanchez to institute a nighttime curfew for juveniles. In a letter to Council members, the groups said the proposal “makes every teenager out at night a criminal suspect.” The organizations – Youth in Action, Providence Youth Student Movement, Direct Action for Rights and Equality, the Rhode Island ACLU, Olneyville Neighborhood Association, and the Univocal Legislative Minority Advisory Coalition, acknowledged the good intentions behind the proposal, but said “its enactment will exacerbate community relations between the police and the city’s youth.” Excerpts from the letter appear below:

The Rhode Island ACLU has sent a letter to Barrington school officials challenging the legality of the town’s proposal to implement a two-tiered plan for out-of-town students to pay tuition fees in order to attend Barrington public schools.  As the proposal stands, the school district has indicated it would charge special education students more than four times the tuition rate that would be charged other students.  In its letter, the Affiliate asserted that charging special education students a higher tuition rate would be in clear violation of federal laws prohibiting public schools from discriminating against students with disabilities.  The letter follows up a previous one sent by the ACLU two weeks ago that questioned the legality of any attempt to exclude altogether any special education students from participating in the non-resident program. In calling the two-tiered tuition plan illegal, the ACLU cited an opinion issued in 1999 by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights which stated: "The Department cannot envision a situation where charging a higher non-resident tuition to a student with disabilities than to a student without disabilities, would not violateviolate [regulations implementing the federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973]. Public school programs, including public school choice programs that utilize non-resident tuition formulae, must ensure that students with disabilities are not subjected to discrimination on the basis of their disability.” Under the circumstances, the ACLU letter states, there "is no lawful basis for proceeding with an out-of-town tuition program that would treat students with disabilities differently from other applying students. We therefore strongly urge the school district to abandon any efforts to charge disparate tuition rates based on special education status."

Ten organizations have submitted written testimony objecting to proposed Department of Health (DOH) regulations that would reinstate a “zero tolerance” scheme in schools for students possessing any over the counter medications in school without advance written parental authorization.

The RI ACLU today filed a lawsuit against the Town of Narragansett in what the ACLU calls “the latest attempt by the town to unnecessarily harass and intimidate URI students living there.” The suit, filed in RI Superior Court by ACLU volunteer attorney H. Jefferson Melish, is on behalf of three URI pharmacy graduate students who have received tickets for parking their cars overnight on their street even though they have a permit to do so.

The Rhode Island ACLU has today taken legal action against the Pawtucket and Little Compton school districts for violating the state’s open records law. The lawsuit, filed in Superior Court by ACLU volunteer attorney Karen Davidson, charges that district officials in each of these districts unlawfully failed to respond to two requests from the ACLU for public documents.

RI ACLU Executive Director Steven Brown: “The latest statistics should serve as wake-up call to all parents and policy-makers.  Rhode Island is on the verge of creating a huge and permanent underclass of teenagers based solely on the arbitrary scores of a standardized test that national studies show serves no meaningful purpose when used for high stakes purposes.”

Few people are aware of the devastating consequences that will follow from the Department of Education’s planned implementation in 2014 of a flawed “high stakes testing” requirement. That was the message today from community and civil rights groups which examined in thorough detail the statistics from the latest standardized test results (known as the “NECAP tests”) for Rhode Island students. Charts and graphs presented by the groups at a news conference today showed that the testing requirement will have a “stunning and severe” adverse impact on every community in the state.  Among the findings the groups released today, based on the 11th Grade NECAP math scores released two weeks ago: