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U.S. Probes Charges of Anti-Latino School Bias

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Times Staff Writer

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating complaints that Latino students are victims of discrimination in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Federal officials said they have been told that Latino children “have been subjected to a separate and unequal school experience--that such students are assigned to severely overcrowded schools, that such students are required to attend such schools on a year-around basis and generally are provided fewer opportunities and resources than the district’s Anglo students.”

The federal probe stems, in large part, from complaints filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1981.

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In a letter mailed to the district on Feb. 26, William Bradford Reynolds, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, requested a wide variety of data to help make a determination “as to what, if any, action may, in this instance, be appropriate.”

Federal Funding

A spokesman for the district, Bill Rivera, said that action conceivably could include the denial of federal funding that currently makes up about 8% of the district’s annual $2.5-billion budget. Rivera stressed, however, that the district believes it has done nothing wrong.

Responding to the complaints cited by the Justice Department, Rivera said students here are assigned to schools “on the basis of residence. . . .”

“If a school is overcrowded, we put students on a year-around schedule--but only with the approval of their parents--or bus them to another school with available space,” Rivera said.

“And district records show that far more fiscal and personnel resources are assigned to schools with predominantly Hispanic and other minority students than to schools with predominantly Anglo students,” he said. “Class sizes are smaller in schools with mostly minority students.”

Sources with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund were not immediately available for comment on Thursday, but Reynolds indicated that many of the complaints were filed in 1981 by John Huerta, an attorney for the group, under provisions of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says schools may not discriminate in the way they spend federal money on education.

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“We have had the matter under investigation for some time,” Reynolds said. “The investigation is ongoing. For that reason, there can be no further comment.”

In his letter to the school district, Reynolds said it would be “helpful” to the department “in our review of this matter to have access to certain information, so that we may be sure we have fully and fairly considered all of the relevant facts.”

The department has asked for data that includes maps showing the precise boundaries of each of the district’s 644 schools; descriptions of the district’s student assignment and transfer policies; studies made regarding overcrowding; racial and ethnic surveys for each school for the current school year, covering both students and faculty, and reports on curricula, dropout rates, attendance and academic test results at each school.

Rivera said the district is cooperating fully with the investigation.

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