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...
The state of Florida in 2022 enacted House Bill 1557, commonly referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3 and restricts such discussions for students through grade 12 based on undefined standards of appropriateness. The...
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...
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...
Katie Rinderle, a fifth-grade gifted specialist in the Cobb County School District in Georgia, was fired from her teaching job in 2023 for reading to her class My Shadow is Purple, an age-appropriate picture book about self-acceptance and navigating gender stereotypes.
In...
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...
