A top U.S. Justice Department official disclosed Thursday her agency has investigated the enrollment procedures in all of Georgia’s nearly 200 school districts since 2011 to ensure they are not barring students based on their immigration status.
“We ended up working very collaboratively with the state Department of Education there to address some of the concerns that we had about enrollment procedures,” Jocelyn Samuels, acting assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, said during a conference call with reporters, “and ensure that they would adopt processes going forward that did not bar or chill the attendance of undocumented students.”
Samuels did not disclose the findings of her agency’s investigation. But a spokeswoman for her agency said officials found enrollment policies in 30 Georgia districts that needed “intervention.” She did not identify those districts.
Georgia’s Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comments Thursday.
Samuels spoke to reporters after Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced new guidelines the government is issuing to ensure public schools don’t screen students based on their immigration status. With enrollment under way for the next school year, they cited a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision that says school districts must educate children regardless of their legal status.
Federal officials said they have been investigating complaints about enrollment practices across the country before and after 2011, when they publicly warned against inquiring about the immigration status of students. In addition to Georgia, the complaints have focused on schools in Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Washington, D.C., federal officials said.
The school districts that have come under investigation, Samuels added, have cooperated with federal authorities and eliminated problems in their enrollment practices.
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