The law is touted as a way to provide “school choice,” but in reality it discriminates against many impoverished families that don’t have the means to send children to distant public schools or expensive private academies.
Finally, our politicians are waking up to the fact that our children need a helping hand, not a pair of handcuffs. They’ve recognized the devastating consequences of the lunacy that has gripped our schools: the idea that children should be tossed out of school and, quite often, into jail for typical adolescent misbehavior.
The SPLC is presenting evidence in a federal court trial in Tampa that children held in the Polk County, Fla., jail were routinely brutalized, subjected to verbal and physical abuse by guards, and denied proper health and rehabilitative services. The case illustrates why children should not be held in adult jails.
Florida prekindergarten programs are violating federal law by turning away children with diabetes and denying them an early childhood education, according to a discrimination complaint filed with the Department of Justice today by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
This publication will aid agencies and organizations in implementing the Youth Family Team Meeting (YFTM) concept to help youth in the family court system. The YFTM offers a low-cost intervention to address the actual causes of a child’s misbehavior, while including the family in the process of inventing new, innovative service plans that use community resources.
In Alabama, African-American children who were orphaned or neglected were routinely sent to live at a “reform school” for juvenile offenders, because state-licensed homes were segregated and few would accept black children. An early SPLC lawsuit changed that practice, opening the doors of such homes to all children in need.
The SPLC has reached an agreement with Florida’s Polk County School Board that will ensure children held at the Central County Jail receive an appropriate education vital to helping them return to their communities.
A federal judge denied a motion today by the Birmingham Police Department in Alabama to dismiss an SPLC lawsuit challenging the use of pepper spray on Birmingham public schoolchildren – a ruling that allows the case to move forward.
An Alabama law gave tax breaks to families transferring their children to successful schools, discriminating against impoverished students in the state’s Black Belt region who were trapped in failing schools. The SPLC asked a federal court to permanently block the Alabama Accountability Act, saying the law violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause because it impermissibly created two classes of students assigned to failing schools – those who can escape them because of their parents’ income or where they live and those who cannot.
An Alabama law that gives tax breaks to families transferring their children to successful schools discriminates against impoverished students in the state’s Black Belt region who are trapped in failing schools, according to a federal lawsuit filed today by the SPLC.
