Here.
We posted the Fort Peck Tribe’s 2017 Complaint here.
The news coverage and investigation that apparently spurred this action was posted here.
An excerpt:
The Wolf Point School District discriminates against Native students and deprives them of basic rights to which they are entitled in school. The Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, whose reservation encompasses the Wolf Point school district, asks that the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education intervene. The unequal treatment of Native students is detrimental to their development and education and violates federal law.
White residents on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, which is majority-Native, control local politics, business, and schools. Gerrymandering and nepotism have perpetuated racial inequality created by federal policies, including preferential land grants for white homesteaders and compulsory boarding school programs for Native students. Schools on the Reservation bear the legacy of the Fort Peck Reservation Boarding School, which violently imposed Western culture, values, and education on Native families through the early 1900s.
Hostility towards Native students and culture persists. Native students in Wolf Point report the use of racial slurs and harmful stereotypes by white administrators, faculty, and staff. Native students are disproportionately disciplined and excluded from school, often without due process. At Wolf Point High School, non-white students, most of whom are Native, are more than twice as likely to receive in- and out-of-school suspensions than white students. These suspensions also violate federal and local standards for discipline. Native students are routinely denied academic and extracurricular opportunities available to white students. Students with academic and behavioral challenges, most of whom are Native, are warehoused in the Opportunity
Learning Center, which is understaffed and underfunded.
The ACLU brought this claim on behalf of a class of Yurok middle school students objecting the closure of the school. In the words of the district court, “Plaintiffs allege that the Del Norte County Unified School District, its Superintendent, and five members of its Board discriminated against Native American students on the basis of race and/or national origin by deciding to close middle school grades of Margaret Keating Elementary School, located on the Yurok Reservation in Klamath, California.” Slip op. at
The district court granted parts of the motion to dismiss, leaving a Section 1983 and a Title VI claim.
Here are the materials: