Registration is open for the October 19-20 conference of the National Coalition on School Diversity, A Struggle We Must Win: Advancing School Integration through Activism, Youth Voice, and Policy Reform.  $100 for general registration, $50 for students.  Sessions will be held at Columbia Teachers College, NYU, and at selected K-12 schools around New York City.  Register here.  We hope to see you there!  

 

Environmental justice at EPA:  PRRAC joined the Yale Law School Environmental Justice Clinic and other advocates in a letter to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights regarding the EPA's Title VI enforcement.  The Commission produced a report in 2016 detailing EPA's critical environmental justice enforcement deficiencies. The report found, for example, that "The EPA has a history of being unable to meet its regulatory deadlines and experiences extreme delays in responding to Title VI complaints in the area of environmental justice... EPA's Office of Civil Rights has never made a formal finding of discrimination and has never denied or withdrawn financial assistance from a recipient in its entire history, and has no mandate to demand accountability within the EPA." This week's letter provided the U.S.C.C.R. with a compilation of additional public information to support and update the 2016 findings and urged it to conduct further inquiries.  

 

Implementing school integration : Materials from the recent training on student assignment policy presented by the Penn State Center for Education and Civil Rights (co-sponsored by PRRAC and the National Coalition on School Diversity) are now online - including fact sheets on voluntary integration efforts, a survey of districts pursuing integration, and more.

 

Other resources

 

Housing and health - beyond the usual policy responses:  Emily Benfer of Loyola Law School and Allyson Gold of University of Alabama Law School have written a comprehensive critique of local, state, and federal policies designed to address housing-related health impacts affecting low income families of color, with recommendations for reform: "There's No Place Like Home: Reshaping Community Interventions and Policies to Eliminate Environmental Hazards and Improve Population Health for Low-Income and Minority Communities" Harvard Law & Policy Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2017

 

Deregulatory review underway at the Department of Education:  "Betsy DeVos Needs to Hear Your Views, So Share Them" by Nora Gordon & Eloise Pasachoff. Comments currently due August 21 (but may be extended to September 20).