Legal battle over 360 High School continues in federal court

Students at 360 High School on Thurbers Avenue in Providence students wait outside after school let out on Wednesday, April 24, 2024. (Michael Salerno/Rhode Island Current)

Did state and city education officials shortchange multilingual learners at a Providence high school?

A judge could soon ponder that question in Rhode Island U.S. District Court, as a lawsuit by four families of students at Providence’s 360 High School chugs forward. 

Jennifer Wood, executive director of Rhode Island Center for Justice and one of the attorneys representing the families, filed the initial complaint against the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) on April 22. RIDE replied with a request for a motion for summary judgment on April 26, which would effectively end the possibility of a trial.

On April 29, both parties offered up documents supporting their respective arguments: RIDE submitted a memo in support of their motion, while Wood and her team backed up their initial arguments with a motion for preliminary injunction, which would prevent the case from being so easily dismissed. 

Now, both plaintiffs and defendants will have until May 13 to respond to each other’s motions. The judge will then presumably schedule a hearing on the cross motions, Wood said in an email Monday.

The case — officially known as Mezon v. Providence Public School Department —  counts 360 High School parents Ysaura Mezón, Maria Pirir, Lucia Mejia and Juan Cruz Estevez among its plaintiffs. The parents, whose children all speak Spanish and are considered multilingual learners, allege that the impending closure of 360 High School violates federal laws requiring equal access to educational opportunities regardless of one’s national origin.  

Both PPSD and RIDE are named as defendants in the lawsuit, along with the Providence School Board and RIDE commissioner Angélica Infante-Green.

The decision to close 360 High School came from Providence Public School Department (PPSD), and was approved by RIDE, which has exercised state control over the city’s public schools since 2019. Both agencies have said the closure is a merger, since 360 High School will be fused with Juanita Sanchez Educational Complex (JSEC), which resides in the same building on Thurbers Avenue. The Providence school department has previously said most 360 students will transfer to the newly merged school, the Juanita Sanchez Life Sciences Institute.

But the plaintiffs’ argument is that the closure will negatively impact teens whose needs are uniquely met by 360 High School. 

“These students accordingly stand to suffer lasting educational harm due to having the proverbial rug pulled out from underneath them with no prior warning by defendants,” the April 29 motion for preliminary injunction reads.

Because the school’s closure cannot be challenged at the state level, the document continues, the plaintiffs must instead appeal to the defendants’ violation of federal law — specifically, the Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1973, which provides for public education for all schoolchildren — or, as the motions put it, expressly forbids placing “new barriers in the way of MLL (multilingual learner) students and their parents.”

 RIDE, PPSD and Commissioner Infante-Green replied to the original complaint and filed their Motion for Summary Judgment on April 26. Three days later their attorneys submitted a full memorandum supporting the potential dismissal of the complaint.  

These students accordingly stand to suffer lasting educational harm due to having the proverbial rug pulled out from underneath them with no prior warning by defendants.

– April 29 motion filed by four families of 360 High School students

The memorandum’s main argument — penned by attorneys Mary Ann Carrol and Aubrey Lombardo of the Providence firm Henneous Carroll Lombardo LLC — is that the complaint should be dismissed on the grounds of “administrative exhaustion. This doctrine requires litigants to attempt relief from one court before petitioning another, which would render useless the plaintiffs’ argument that they can’t appeal the school closure at the state level. 

The education agencies’ attorneys cite a state general law, last updated in 1956, that “provides a right to an evidentiary hearing before a RIDE Hearing Officer” in education disputes.

“The fact that RIDE approved PPSD’s decision to merge JSEC and 360 does not render the administrative appeal process ‘futile or inadequate,’” the memo reads.

The student body at 360 High School numbers approximately 335 students.In the 2022-2023 school year, the school demonstrated a 75% four-year graduation rate with about 38% of graduates enrolling in a postsecondary educational program. During the same period, English language arts proficiency was 8%, science proficiency was just under 5%, and math proficiency was 1.5%, according to education department data.

Pieces of evidence offered in support of the schools’ merger are 360’s low assessment rates in multilingual learning and low graduation rate. The merger will save $1.5 million to $2 million for the district, the memorandum argues.

The defendants also argue that previous cases based on equal opportunity laws have seen federal courts reassert “[n]o single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of schools,’” a quote from the 1974 Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley. 

“Plaintiffs here cannot meet even one of the elements necessary for a preliminary injunction,” the defendants argue, noting that “alleged damages are entirety speculative” and “Plaintiffs would only be irreparably harmed if the Court were for some reason to grant their request and force them to continue to attend a failing school, a result that would neither be equitable nor in the public interest.”

But the plaintiffs have not given up on the idea that past cases might help secure the lawsuit’s continuation. In the request for preliminary injunction, Wood cites Issa v. School District of Lancaster, in which federal judges ordered a Pennsylvania school district to allow refugee students to attend a local, regular high school, instead of a special disciplinary school. In this case, the Court of Appeals upheld the preliminary injunction order, and ultimately ruled that the school district had violated the Equal Educational Opportunity Act.

“In Issa, the court recognized that the harm caused by assigning MLL students to a school that poorly serves MLL students and their parents can constitute an actionable violation of the EEOA,” the plaintiffs’ April 29 motion reads. “RIDE/PPSD have done exactly that here.”

RIDE and PPSD did not immediately return requests for comment about the litigation’s recent developments.

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