The US Department of Education is officially looking into allegations of discriminatory behavior against Latinos on the part of the Jefferson Parish school district in Louisiana. The Department's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) will investigate three of four allegations made on behalf of Latino students by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) according to a letter dated Dec. 10.

The letter responded to four points raised by the SPLC including; "(1) Not employing sufficient qualified staff to effectively implement its language program; (2) exiting ELL students based only on their speaking ability (not their reading or writing ability), (3) failing to appropriately monitor students that have exited the program, and; (4) decentralizing oversight of the language program from administrators "with specialized knowledge of district and federal ESL requirements" to principals who are ill-equipped to implement ESL programs at their schools. As a consequence, you informed OCR that ELL students are failing to make yearly progress and are struggling academically on standardized tests."

The letter states that the first issue is being incorporated into an already-existing complaint against the school district and will be incorporated with that case. The OCR will open new investigations into the second and third causes of concern.

As for the fourth issue raised, the DOE replied that "Title VI does not prohibit a recipient from decentralizing its oversight of the delivery of language services from the district to the principal level."

The DOE made it clear that the fact it has started an investigation was not to be construed as having found evidence of wrongdoing.

According to the Times-Picayune, it is the third time that the SPLC has filed a lawsuit against the school district in a period of two years. Previously, the SPLC alleged that the district of unfairly arresting black students in January. It also alleged that a disproportionate number of black and disabled students were being sent to alternative campuses in a May complaint.