US Department of Education Releases Annual OCR Update

Annually, the United States Department of Education is required to publish reports related to civil rights. This year, the report touts the following achievements from the Trump Administration:

Among OCR’s many accomplishments, key initiatives, and successes of this fiscal year include the following:

• Resolving 10,185 complaints, with more than 2,000 of these resolutions requiring the school to make substantive changes to better protect their students’ civil rights – totals which significantly outpaced previous administrations;
• Announcing the Department’s new Title IX Final Rule, an historic effort to strengthen Title IX protections for survivors of sexual harassment, while restoring due process in campus proceedings;
• Resolving a directed investigation requiring the University of Southern California to make sweeping reforms to the way it addresses sexual harassment in light of its mishandling of sexual misconduct by Dr. George Tyndall;
• Completing one of its largest comprehensive compliance reviews ever into systemic sexual assault problems at Pennsylvania State University, requiring the University to significantly revise its handling of reports of sexual harassment in light of its treatment of complaints against Coach Jerry Sandusky;
• Including new questions in OCR’s biennial Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) designed to identify incidents of sexual misconduct perpetrated by school staff or personnel, the first universal data collection to systematically gather teacher-on-student sexual misconduct data systemically by school district;
• After recognizing a 208% increase in sexual violence complaints at the K-12 level between FY 2010 and FY 2019, and on the heels of OCR’s FY 2019 investigation into Chicago Public Schools revealing a disturbing pattern of student-on-student and staff-on-student sexual violence, announcing a new Title IX initiative aimed at combatting sexual violence in at the elementary and secondary levels; and
• Establishing a new Outreach, Prevention, Education, and Non-discrimination (OPEN) Center, focused on strengthening proactive civil rights compliance.

You can find a copy of the OCR Update for FY2020 by clicking here.