News & Commentary

Rhode Island Legal Services and the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island have today filed a lawsuit in R.I. Superior Court challenging a decision issued this month by the Council of Elementary and Secondary Education (CESE) that upholds a method of providing services to English Language Learners (EL) that the two groups claim clearly violates federal and state law and significantly shortchanges the educational rights of EL students.

UPDATE 1/28/20: The Council affirmed the ruling, but directed the Commissioner of Education "to begin the process of revising current ELL regulations." Here is the statement from the organizations that had sought rejection of the ruling:

A legal claim for damages has been sent today to the City of Pawtucket over a School Resource Officer’s (SRO) gratuitous and unlawful handcuffing and arrest of a 13-year-old African-American middle school honors student. The damages claim was submitted by ACLU of Rhode Island cooperating attorney Shannah Kurland as a required legal prerequisite to the filing of a lawsuit on behalf of the student, Tre’sur Johnson.

The 2019 Top 10. A completely unexhaustive list of (some of) the most absurd civil liberties violations we encountered this year. 

The following op-ed ran in several local papers earlier this month:

Barrington Middle School student “E. Doe” (as he is designated in court papers) is, by his principal’s own account, a “great boy,” “respectful,” and had never been a disciplinary problem. So why, then, have the principal and the school committee spent a year and a half in a relentless battle, all at taxpayer expense, to overturn a three-day suspension against him that Doe successfully challenged as unlawful? Why would the school committee go so far as to actually sue Doe in court and (until the school committee claimed it was never their intent) seek an award of attorneys’ fees against him? And why embroil an innocent student in a court fight after three separate authorities at the R.I. Department of Education (RIDE) unanimously agreed that the suspension infringed on Doe’s rights and violated a law enacted to stem unnecessary out-of-school suspensions?

In what the ACLU of Rhode Island calls an “outrageous and shameful” attack on one of its own students, the Barrington School Committee has filed a lawsuit in R.I. Superior Court against a middle school student who successfully challenged before the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) his three-day out-of-school suspension. In seeking to overturn RIDE’s decision, the school committee is demanding a recovery of its attorneys’ fees against the student and RIDE.

A U.S. Department of Justice memo, formally released yesterday as a result of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of RI and RI Legal Services (and also obtained independently by the Boston Globe), contains a blistering critique of the Providence school district’s (PSD) treatment of English language learner (EL) students.  But, the ACLU and RILS said today, release of the memo does more than document a systematic violation of EL students’ rights by the PSD. Specifically, it also highlights a blatant abuse of the Access to Public Records Act by the Providence school district, and underlines the RI Department of Education’s (RIDE) own failure to require PSD’s compliance with federal and state law obligations regarding the legal rights of EL students.

Attorneys for the ACLU of Rhode Island and R.I. Legal Services (RILS) today filed a lawsuit against the Providence School District for hiding information about its extensive violations of the rights of English Language Learner (EL) students that led to a settlement agreement between the school system and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) more than a year ago.