Prov School District Sued for Hiding Documents Related to English Language Services Violations

Prov School District Sued for Hiding Documents Related to English Language Services Violations

The Rhode Island ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Providence School District on Thursday for hiding information about its violations of the rights of English Language Learner (EL) students.

As GoLocalProv reported, those violations led to a settlement agreement between the school system and the U.S. Department of Justice in August of 2018.

Read the Lawsuit Here

“The rationales offered by the City for keeping this critical information secret border on the frivolous. The public deserves a better commitment to transparency from the largest city government in the state,” said ACLU of RI executive director Steven Brown.

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The lawsuit filed by the ACLU seeks a court order requiring the immediate release of the requested records, imposing a fine on the city and awarding attorneys fees.

The Lawsuit

The lawsuit seeks a court order requiring the school district to release the DOJ documents identifying the various violations of federal law committed by the school district, which are referenced in the detailed settlement agreement.

According to the ACLU, in March, the City refused a request from RI Legal Services for a copy of the DOJ’s fact-finding documents by claiming, among other things, that the records were “protected by the attorney-client privilege” and constituted “preliminary drafts” exempt from disclosure under APRA.

However, the lawsuit notes that since “the United States is the federal agency responsible for investigating” the school district, there was no attorney-client relationship to assert, and that there is nothing preliminary about “the final findings of the U.S. Department of Justice.”

The 22-page settlement agreement, entered last August, acknowledges that the Department of Justice had found a dozen violations of federal law, including the school district’s placement of “hundreds of ELs in schools that lacked EL services without obtaining the parent’s voluntary and informed waivers of these services,” its use of “an educationally unsound EL program,” and its failure “to staff its EL programs with enough qualified teachers.”

RI Legal Services attorney Veronica Not added, “It’s time to bring some transparency to the process. The full findings of the Department of Justice, which form the basis for its Settlement Agreement with Providence with regard to EL services, would shine a light on identified deficiencies in services and help close achievement gaps as the State begins to implement reforms in the District. The families of Providence students deserve no less.”