Students with disabilities were denied access to New Orleans public schools and often pushed into schools that failed to provide them with a free and appropriate education as required by federal mandate.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and a coalition of advocacy groups first filed an...
Mississippi funded its charter schools through an unconstitutional scheme that diverted public tax dollars from traditional public schools. The SPLC filed a lawsuit in state court to end the funding system.
The lawsuit called for the court to strike down the funding provisions of the...
Mississippi has repeatedly violated a nearly 150-year-old, legally binding obligation to operate a “uniform system of free public schools” for all children, an obligation placed on the state as a condition of rejoining the Union after the Civil War.
Mississippi enshrined this requirement...
After the U.S. Department of Education failed to fully comply with public records requests that could shed light on the gun lobby’s possible role in the department not standing in the way of states and school districts using federal funds to arm educators, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of the...
In 2018, the Duval County School Board in Florida began hiring armed civilians, known as “school safety assistants,” to patrol the district’s elementary schools. The program threatened the safety of thousands of students by opening the door for inadequately trained assistants – who are not law...
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 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...
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...
After Georgia’s Cobb County School District failed to implement and enforce recommended safety protocols to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in schools, the Southern Poverty Law Center and its allies filed a federal lawsuit describing how the school district’s actions unlawfully deny students with...
