The United States Department of Justice and Providence Public School District entered into a new settlement agreement regarding services for multilingual learners on Wednesday.
The new agreement supersedes a 2018 agreement, which placed all of the PPSD’s MLL programs under federal monitoring until August of this year. The DOJ will continue to monitor only the district’s newcomer programs through the 2026-27 school year.
Comprising a small part of the district’s MML programs, these newcomer programs support about 300 students who have recently arrived in the country and have limited or interrupted education.
“Monitoring for the district’s other nearly 8,000 multilingual learners under the 2018 agreement ends effective today,” wrote the PPSD and Rhode Island Department of Education in a joint press release.
In February, the DOJ received complaints about the PPSD’s newcomer programs and Newcomer Academy, a school within the PPSD. Last year, 46 students at the school signed a petition asking for more English as a Second Language classes.
After an investigation under the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, the DOJ found that the PPSD’s newcomer programs did not adequately support students, effectively “depriving them of equal opportunities to receive special education and participate in programs such as career and technical education,” reads a DOJ press release.
“Providence’s woeful history of half measures and consistent failures to meet the critical needs of its most vulnerable students has necessitated today’s action: a more closely targeted and stringent agreement focused on the newcomer program,” Zachary Cunha, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Rhode Island, said in the press release.
The agreement establishes dozens of clear, specific requirements for the PPSD, many with deadlines. The district will be required to audit all of its Newcomer Programs each semester for the agreement’s duration and provide annual reports to the DOJ about its progress.
The requirements include measures for improving the identification and enrollment of eligible students, integrating newcomers with their peers, offering sufficient ESL courses to students, providing language assistance to parents with limited English proficiency and ensuring that newcomers with disabilities have equal access to services.
The district will also be required to offer compensatory services to students enrolled at the PPSD’s Newcomer Academy during the 2023-24 school year who were not offered standalone ESL classes before May 1.
“Federal law is clear: all students, including immigrant students, have a right to meaningfully participate in their district’s educational programs,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the press release.
The new agreement includes a requirement that the PPSD will staff a sufficient number of ESL-Certified teachers to newcomer programs by Jan. 1. In 2020, RIDE and PPSD announced a new program offering certification reimbursements to incentivize more teachers to gain ESL credentials. But, due to the district’s $11 million budget deficit, that program is on the chopping block.
PPSD Superintendent Javier Montañez wrote in a community letter that the PPSD won’t make any budget decisions until after a Nov. 20 hearing that will determine how much the district is owed by the City of Providence.
The district has made over $5 million worth of investments in MLLs since the 2018 agreement was put in place, according to their press release.
Denezia Fahie, the executive director of the Providence Student Union, told The Herald that while PPSD and RIDE can celebrate that they’re “no longer in a monitoring state,” other actors beyond the DOJ should hold the district “accountable for providing proper services to our young people,” she said.
“Our community is ultimately your highest form of accountability,” Fahie added. “If your community continues to tell you that you’re failing, it doesn’t matter what the Department of Justice is saying.”
Ciara Meyer is a senior staff writer from Saratoga Springs, New York. She plans on concentrating in Statistics and English Nonfiction. In her free time, she loves scrapbooking and building lego flowers.
