A federal court has granted class action status in the SPLC’s lawsuit against the Birmingham Police Department, meaning the organization will represent all current and future students who could be exposed to pepper spray at the hands of police officers stationed in the city’s schools.

Children of undocumented immigrants who live in Florida will no longer be forced to pay out-of-state tuition rates as the result of a court ruling in an SPLC lawsuit challenging the state’s tuition policy.

The SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project held a two-day training session this week to help New York educators comply with a new state law requiring public schools to take specific steps to protect students from harassment and discrimination.

A noose is found hanging from a goalpost on a high school campus.Students pull the turban off a Sikh student and cut his hair. White students taunt their majority-black rival with racial slurs at a high school basketball game.These are just a few examples of the hateful and bigoted acts schools encounter every year.

The unsolved murders of two undocumented immigrants near Eloy, Ariz., this spring, coupled with four remarkably similar killings in the same area in 2007, have pointed to a possible vigilante campaign to murder Latino border crossers, according to the Fall 2012 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, released today.

After the Southern Poverty Law Center responded to a plea for help from students in Savannah, Tenn., we’re happy to report that students successfully wore pro-LGBT slogans at school last week without resistance and with mostly positive responses from classmates.

At Maggiore Elementary School in Jefferson Parish, La., there were no interpreters for students with Spanish-speaking parents.

The Southern Poverty Law Center lauded the Davidson County sheriff’s announcement today that he will end the 287(g) immigration enforcement program in Nashville, Tenn., but will continue to monitor immigration policy there.

SPLC Legal Director Mary Bauer told the U.S. Civil Rights Commission that Alabama’s anti-immigrant law has wrought “great damage” in the state. “It has destroyed lives, ripped apart families, devastated communities and left our economy in tatters.”

The Mississippi Agriculture & Forestry Museum and the state’s attorney general have recognized the right of same-sex couples to hold commitment ceremonies at the museum after the Southern Poverty Law Center demanded the facility end its unlawful policy of refusing to rent the facilities to same-sex couples for such an event.