Four civil rights groups filed a federal complaint on Tuesday accusing the municipal court and public school district of the northeast Texas town of Bonham of unfairly penalizing Black and disabled students for behavior complaints by pushing them out of schools and sometimes into the county jail.
The four groups — Disability Rights Texas, Texas Appleseed, Texas Civil Rights Project, and the National Center for Youth Law — have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to require the district to compensate specifically harmed students for damages, as well as modify its absence guidelines and implement bias training for both court and school employees.
The complaint alleges that the city’s municipal court and Bonham ISD, located outside of Dallas, has discriminated against both Black students and disabled students through creating a hostile environment at school and often sending them to the disciplinary alternative education program, known as DAEP, which educates students who commit specific disciplinary or criminal offenses separately from their peers.
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