Court Cases Education

Bakersfield, CA – Please attribute the following statements on a settlement reached between Latino and Black students, community activist organizations and the Kern High School District to the following organizations: California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA), MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund), Equal Justice Society, Greater Bakersfield Legal Assistance, Inc. (GBLA), and Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, P.C. The settlement approved today with the Kern High School District (KHSD) Board of Trustees is the result of a three-year court battle to stop years of discriminatory discipline practices that deprived African American and Latino students of their right to an education.

Tucson, AZ – A request by the Tucson Unified School District to be released in part from court supervision of its desegregation plan is premature and should be rejected, attorneys for Latino students argued in an opposition brief submitted to a federal court today.

Austin, TX- MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) is asking a state court to issue an emergency order to stop Texas education officials from continuing to illegally bypass existing rules involving school funding.

San Antonio, TX – Texas education officials illegally changed how property taxes are calculated in wealthy school districts, with the effect of substantially reducing the funds available for schools in poorer districts, a lawsuit filed Thursday charged.

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SAN ANTONIO, TX – Dozens of counties in Texas are violating the federal Voting Rights Act by failing to provide bilingual voting information on their websites, including information on polling places, according to MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund).

BAKERSFIELD, CA – A California District Court of Appeal panel has refused to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a coalition of civil rights groups against Kern High School District (KHSD) over disciplinary policies that unlawfully target African American and Latino students. The court summarily denied KHSD’s extraordinary writ request to revisit the trial court’s denial of dismissal.

BERWYN, IL – A third-grade teacher who punished her students for speaking Spanish in her classroom has been reassigned just days after MALDEF contacted school officials about the incident.

DETROIT, MI – Yesterday, Judge Stephen J. Murphy of the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Michigan ruled that MALDEF’s lawsuit against Systems USA Inc. and Systems USA Consulting LLC for violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) should proceed as a class action. MALDEF’s lawsuit alleges that the companies recruited and enticed computer programmers to travel from Mexico to the United States for nonexistent jobs, and systematically defrauded the federal government to obtain visas for those individuals by representing that the companies would be employing the programmers once they arrived in the United States.

SAN ANTONIO, TX – MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) welcomes Texas House Speaker Joe Straus’ directive to his colleagues to review key aspects of Texas’ school finance system and to make recommendations that would improve its efficiency and educational quality.