Cherry Creek Schools settles DOJ lawsuit to improve multilingual communication

Heather Willard
·2 min read

DENVER (KDVR) — The U.S. Department of Justice says it has settled a lawsuit with the Cherry Creek School District that was filed after allegations surfaced that the district failed to communicate properly with parents with limited English proficiency.

The district is one of Colorado’s largest, serving about 53,000 students with parents who report speaking over 150 languages. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado said in a release that it received multiple complaints from parents with limited English proficiency who said they could not participate meaningfully in important school programs and activities because the district did not provide effective language assistance services.

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Some complaints alleged that Cherry Creek School District did not provide interpreters and translation services to parents with limited English proficiency during enrollment and during expulsion hearings and other disciplinary proceedings. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division investigated the complaints under the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974.

“No parent should be left in the dark about their child’s education,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in the release. “Open and effective communication between schools and parents, including parents with limited English proficiency, is essential to safeguarding students’ equal access to educational opportunities.”

The district has agreed to improve communication in areas that include:

  • Enrollment: Cherry Creek School District will identify parents with limited English skills, document their preferred language and provide them with language assistance services to help them understand the enrollment process.

  • Student discipline: The district has committed to translating letters that involve suspensions and expulsions into the parents’ preferred language, and providing language assistance during disciplinary proceedings that can lead to suspension or expulsion.

  • Parent engagement: The district will “administer surveys and hold listening sessions in over a dozen languages to better understand” the parents’ communication needs.

“Parents with limited English proficiency face barriers to understanding how public schools work,” Cole Finegan, U.S. attorney for the District of Colorado, said in the release. “This agreement is intended to ensure that the Cherry Creek School District implements policies and practices to enable all parents in the district to participate meaningfully in their children’s education. We urge all school districts in Colorado to review their practices to ensure that they are complying with their obligations to provide language assistance services to parents with limited English proficiency.”

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Possible civil rights violations can be reported at civilrights.justice.gov. Additional translations of the U.S. Attorney’s Office press release can be found online here.

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