On behalf of six students at the Sophie B. Wright Charter School in Orleans Parish, La., the SPLC sought an injunction in state court to halt disciplinary actions resulting from a senior prank. Following a water balloon fight that caused no serious injuries, the students were suspended for five...
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Decades of research and experience have led to a consensus among mental health practitioners throughout the nation that intensive home- and community-based mental health services are much more effective and less expensive than institutionalizing children and youth who have ongoing mental health...
In 2019, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission violated Florida’s open meetings laws, effectively denying high school students and youth advocates the right to speak before the commission, which was created to investigate system failures in the 2018 school shooting at...
Tennessee’s voucher program threatened to siphon hundreds of millions of tax dollars from Nashville and Memphis public schools to private schools, raising the specter of more budget cuts for already underfunded public schools. The SPLC and its allies filed a...
In July 2020, federal officials issued an illegal rule that would siphon over $1 billion in emergency aid from public schools to private schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Southern Poverty Law Center and its allies filed a lawsuit challenging the rule issued by U.S. Secretary of Education...
After Florida teacher Amy Donofrio refused a request by school officials to remove a Black Lives Matter flag hanging outside her high school classroom, she was reassigned to nonteaching duties and banned from her school’s campus. The Southern Poverty Law Center and its co-counsel, Scott • Wagner...
The Alabama Department of Human Resources (DHR) discriminates against foster children and youth with mental impairments by unnecessarily segregating them in restrictive, psychiatric residential treatment facilities and by denying them an opportunity to grow up in loving homes and community-based...
Under Florida’s Baker Act, thousands of children each year are taken from their classrooms and transported – handcuffed and in the back of police cars – to psychiatric facilities without their parents’ input or consent and sometimes over their objections. There, they can be held for up to 72...
After the Florida Department of Health filed an emergency rule that barred school districts in the state from requiring students to wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Law Offices of Joshua Spector, P.A. filed a legal complaint.
The petition...
The SPLC, the Law Offices of Joshua Spector, P.A. and the Education Law Center of New Jersey filed a lawsuit that seeks a hearing before the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings to invalidate an emergency rule...
