Office for Civil Rights Needs More Resources

To the Editor:

Students are increasingly relying on the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to address sexual violence at their schools. OCR has 104 open sexual-violence investigations against colleges and another 30 against school districts. OCR has an important role here, but its resources are being severely strained. The number of complaints filed with OCR has increased from 5,000 in 2004 to 9,400 in 2014, while the number of staff has dropped from 700 in 2002 to 560 in 2014. Sexual violence investigations take considerable time and resources, and they don’t do anyone much good if they take years to resolve. Five of the open investigations were filed in 2011 and 2012 and another 23 in 2013. Of the investigations that have been completed over the past five years, many have taken two years or longer.

OCR does much important work beyond sexual violence – protecting students from harassment based on race, sex, national origin, and disability; fighting the school-to-prison pipeline for minority students and challenging achievement gaps in public school; and ensuring that students with disabilities get special education and other needed services. While resolving cases of sexual violence quickly is important, it is no less important to protect minority students from discriminatory discipline that pushes them out of school, gets them arrested by school resource officers, and puts them on a path to prison instead of graduation.

Quite simply, OCR needs more resources to be able to address all these issues and address them quickly and will need even more to meet its increased obligations under the proposed Campus Accountability and Security Act. The president’s proposed budget for 2016 increases OCR’s funding from $100 million to $130 million, which would allow for the hiring of as many as 200 more staff. It must pass if OCR is to keep up with its increasing workload and with the expectations of students, schools, and the public. Even then, it will take months to hire people and even longer to train them, with morale at the agency continuing to suffer, more people leaving, and investigations continuing to take too long.

Howard Kallem
Former Chief Regional Attorney

D.C. Enforcement Office, Office for Civil Rights