The complaints include discrimination and sexual harassment allegations at schools and universities.
It’s been a busy year for the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
During the first nine days of August, the federal agency released reports of alleged anti-Semitic discrimination at Drexel University in Philadelphia, sexual harassment of students in the San Diego Unified School District, and Title IX violations where high school softball players in Minneapolis reported they were denied equal access to sports facilities, according to the agency’s website.
Some of the most notable cases involving K–12 schools or colleges are publicized on the U.S. Department of Education website. There were 15 since Jan. 10, and seven include anti-Semitism allegations.
The department’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon said during an Aug. 16 presentation at City Club in Cleveland, Ohio, that last year, OCR received 19,201 complaints, double that of a decade prior and roughly triple the 2003 total.
She noted there are around 43 million students in grades K–12 and 18 million college and university students in the United States.
“That speaks to an incredibly high volume of concern in schools right now about how we ask our kids to learn, the conditions under which they are learning, and the fragility of the Civil Rights guarantee in the country,” Lhamon said during the event.
“We are trying to meet that incredibly high volume of need with nearly record low staffing in our office.”
Lhamon said the spike in complaints is, in part, due to school leaders’ misunderstanding of Constitutional free speech protections. They often ignore escalating situations out of fear that any actions could violate someone’s First Amendment rights.
“A school still has a federal legal obligation to ensure that the very same speech does not create or contribute to a hostile environment for students based on their shared ancestry,” she said.
“That means schools must take steps to evaluate whether rights are violated—if schools have noticed that they might be—and to take steps to make sure that no hostile environment persists.”
A “single utterance” of a word or phrase that offends someone typically doesn’t rise to the level where the learning institution is considered liable for allowing a hostile environment, but continued discriminatory language or actions on or off campus regardless if it’s a student, employee or school visitor is considered a Civil Rights violation, Lhamon said.
OCR recently investigated 253 complaints of sexual harassment of San Diego public school students dating back to 2017.
It found that district leaders failed to follow regulatory procedures in response to complaints that employees harassed students and that students were harassed by other students, according to Aug. 9 documents on the U.S. Department of Education website.
In one instance, school employees reported that no actions were taken against a middle school boy who allegedly had a history of groping other students “because he is special ed.”
San Diego Unified School District Superintendent Lamont Jackson signed a letter acknowledging OCR’s findings and agreeing to follow all Civil Rights guidelines for documenting and reporting incidents in the future.
Lhamon cited other cases she worked on in recent months.
In one instance, a 13-year-old student who emigrated from Africa was allegedly teased to the point where she was failing classes and considering suicide.
This included an episode where her peers were accused of showing her a picture of malnourished children in Africa and asked her if they were relatives.
The district did not respond to complaints for three months before moving her into different classes, where the verbal abuse continued, according to OCR.
In another instance, school leaders allegedly ignored video evidence of a disabled student being ridiculed and physically attacked.
Earlier this summer, leadership at a community college was found by OCR to have fallen short of taking appropriate action after a professor who led an all-female classroom asked students to remove their shirts so he could demonstrate a “medical exam.”
Administrators responded to the complaint, investigated, fired the professor, and reported back to the first complainant, but they failed to communicate those actions to all students in the class, said OCR.
“That piece is so important,” Lhamon said. “People who are affected by a hostile environment need to know that the school is taking steps to remedy it.”
According to OCR’s 2023 annual report, 35 percent of the 19,201 complaints filed last year pertained to disabilities, 18 percent to race and national origin, and 3 percent to age.
Forty-two percent pertained to sex, though 5,590 of the 8,151 complaints in that area “were filed by a single individual.”
A total of 16,448 cases were resolved last year, up from 16,515 in 2022.