PROVIDENCE – The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island and Rhode Island Legal Services last week filed a lawsuit against the Providence Public School Department, accusing school officials of hiding information about violations of the rights of students who are English-language learners.
The violations led to a settlement agreement between the school district and the U.S. Department of Justice more than a year ago, according to the ACLU.
The Access to Public Records Act lawsuit seeks a court order requiring the school district to release the Department of Justice documents identifying the federal law violations committed by the school district, the ACLU said. Those violations are referenced in the detailed settlement agreement.
In March, the Providence school district refused a request from Rhode Island 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.
The lawsuit argues 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 ACLU said the 22-page settlement agreement acknowledged that the Department of Justice had found a dozen violations of federal law, including the school district’s placement of “hundreds of [English learners] in schools that lacked [English-learner] services without obtaining the parent’s voluntary and informed waivers of these services,” its use of “an educationally unsound [English-learner] program,” and its failure “to staff its [English-learner] programs with enough qualified teachers.”
The lawsuit, filed by ACLU cooperating attorney Ellen Saideman and Rhode Island Legal Services staff attorney Veronika Kot, who filed the APRA request for the documents, seeks a court order requiring the immediate release of the requested records, imposing a fine on the city and awarding attorneys fees.
“English learners in Providence have long been deprived of the language-access services to which they are entitled by law and which they need to achieve academically,” Kot said in a news release. “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 [English-learner] 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.”
Saideman said: “Providence is compounding its deficient services for EL students with blatant violations of Rhode Island’s public records laws. The public is entitled to know what the Department of Justice found regarding the [English-learner] programs operated by Providence. Obviously, Providence wants to conceal this information from the public. The first step in fixing a problem is to admit it. To fix the [English-learner] program, we need to know what Providence has done wrong. The DOJ findings are important public information.”
