Production and distribution of City Club forums and ideastream public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black, fond of greater Cleveland, Inc.. Hello and welcome to the City of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, August 16th.

And I'm Nick Hammond Strider, provost at Cleveland State University and a proud member of the Board of Trustees of the City Hall.

Today, it is my honor to welcome our Speaker, Catherine E Lhamon, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, the Office of Civil Rights, or OCR, to enforces federal civil rights laws in schools, as well as other recipients of Department of Education, federal funding throughout the nation.

It is of case investigations, push policy resources and provide school and community technical assistance.

In a recent report, OCR reported the highest volume of civil rights complaints in its history, and it shows no signs of slowing.

There are many explanations for this increase, including rising partizan tensions, the Israel-Hamas war and attacks on LGBTQ rights, particularly in colleges and universities.

Today we will hear more about the work being done to ensure all students have equal access to education.

Our Speaker this afternoon assistance Assistant Secretary Lehman was nominated by President Barack Obama in June 2013 and was unanimously confirmed by the Senate a month later until January 2021.

She chaired the US Commission on Civil Rights, to which President Obama appointed her in 2016 and served as legal affairs secretary to California Governor Gavin Newsom.

If you have a question for our speaker, you can text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and Friends of the City Club of Cleveland please join me in welcoming Assistant Secretary Kathryn E Lehman.

Thank you, Dr. Schraeder.

And it's so terrific to see all of you today.

I'm really delighted to be with you.

And just to jump right into it, in this increasing, highly divisive time nationally and specifically with respect to schools, I'm grateful to talk about the importance of our longstanding bipartisan congressional guarantees related to civil rights, specifically in schools, which is where I enforce.

But Congress promised us all in 1964 that no person will experience discrimination based on race, color or national origin.

And since then, it added protections for nondiscrimination based on sex and disability as well.

In these statutes, Congress promised that our highest national aspirations of equality will be the experience of students in schools and will be the experience of all of us in all walks of life that the federal government touches.

I don't enforce those other ones.

So today I'll focus on schools.

But those congressional promises are and have been incredibly important to the experience of equality in this country for longer than I have been alive.

And we know that we have distance yet to travel to make those congressional guarantees real for every student in school.

So today I'll discuss how the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education goes that distance for kids and for our country.

And I'll share a little bit of information about what we see in schools to make concrete, why the beautiful nondiscrimination guarantee from Congress is so important, both because kids deserve the education that Congress promises to them free from discrimination, and because schools are where we teach people how to participate in democracy and that it's important to do so.

So the stakes of what we teach in school, in addition to reading, writing and arithmetic, are incredibly high for all of us.

Starting with where we started in the introduction, Congress has charged my office, the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education to enforce what President Kennedy called the simple justice that no federal funds shall be spent to discriminate.

It's a simple guarantee.

It's really quite beautiful.

And it means that it is our job and the Office for Civil Rights to ensure that more than 49 million public school students in the P-12 sector, as well as more than 18 million college and university students, actually learn in the nondiscrimination.

Nondiscrimination promise the Congress has given to us.

The main areas that we enforce in my office are related to race, sex and disability.

And as I mentioned, we received an all time high in complaint volume in the last fiscal year that just ended in September.

And in this fiscal year, we already are seeing a double digit percent increase in the complaint volume that has come in.

I want to concretize what that means.

When we saw 19,201.

Complaints come to our office last year.

That is roughly double the complaint volume that we were receiving a decade before and roughly triple the complaint volume at 15 and 20 years before.

So that speaks to an incredibly high volume of concern in schools right now about how we ask our kids to learn the conditions under which they are learning and the fragility of the civil rights guarantee in the country.

We are trying to meet that incredibly high volume of need with nearly record low staffing in our office.

So it's not my ideal path for how we would navigate that acute quantum of need.

I also want to return to that point at the end with an ask for each of you.

And as we start, I will jump right in to substance about what it is that we see and what we hear in school, starting with what has been very much in the news.

I know we all read about a proliferation of anti-Semitic, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian hate in schools.

Now, I think that proliferation clarifies for all of us a repeated, quite ugly need for a federal backstop against harm.

As distressing as the repetition and the openness of the vitriol that we are reading about in school communities is now as distressing as that is.

I'm also deeply distressed about the repeated inefficacy in school responses that we are seeing as we are reading about and hearing about that kind of vitriol in schools.

I want to flag here that Congress did not give my office jurisdiction over religion.

So the lens that we bring to these insinuations of hate are examining anti-Semitic, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian discrimination through a race and national origin lodestar.

Here are our key civil rights lodestar for this kind of discrimination.

We look at two key areas.

One, do not treat people differently based on race and national origin.

And the second is, do not allow a hostile environment based on race or national origin to persist, limiting or denying access to education based on race and national origin.

I hope that first one do not treat people differently.

It's pretty basic.

But we are finding when we investigate schools violations of that even most basic premise, we are finding, for example, a school that imposes on the Muslim Students Association different rules for holding an event than those that are advertised by the school.

And also that are applied to other organizations.

That is unlawful, different treatment.

And we are prepared to enforce to ensure that schools don't do it.

When we address the second one, the hostile environment inquiry there, we're looking at a hostile environment that prevents, for example, Jewish students or Palestinian students from being able to focus on their studies.

And when we look at that, we have been hearing so many reasons why schools think they can't act, protect to protect students from discrimination.

Here is my short answer.

Yes, we can.

And I'll offer a longer explanation also.

I frequently hear that schools find it challenging to analyze how to comply with constitutional free speech protections and nondiscrimination obligations.

I want to be especially clear here.

There is no necessary conflict between protecting free speech and not discriminating.

Even if a school assumes or stipulates that particular speech is protected by the Constitution or by a school's institutional values, both of which are important.

A school still has a federal legal obligation to ensure that the very same speech does not create or contribute to a hostile environment for students based on their shared ancestry.

That means that schools must take steps to evaluate where the rights are violated.

If schools have notice that they might be, and to take steps to ensure that no hostile environment persists.

Those steps could include a campus conversation about a school's core inclusion value.

They could include offering counseling and supports to ensure students safety.

They could include proactively communicating to a school community about how to file nondiscrimination complaints and to seek redress from the school.

They could include holding conversations in the campus about teaching students how to engage civilly in discourse on topics about which persons strongly disagree.

But here's what they categorically cannot include.

They cannot include ignoring rhetoric that causes or contributes to a hostile environment.

Just so you know, the legal test for whether a hostile environment exists is pretty high.

We typically find that a hostile environment exists where there is unwelcome race or national origin conduct.

That, based on the totality of the circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies access to education.

It's a pretty high test.

That means, for example, that typically a single utterance that someone finds deeply offensive generally would not rise to the level that it creates a hostile environment for a student.

But repetition of that same utterance, coupled with other harassing conduct, could well be so severe or pervasive that the conduct creates a hostile environment that a school must redress.

It's also not relevant to the federal civil rights guarantee.

Whether the hostile environment is created by someone who is employed by the school or who is a student at the school, or by someone who is off campus or a visitor to the school.

Speech occurring on and off campus can contribute to the creation of a hostile environment based on shared ancestry, and any visitor to a campus could contribute contribute to the creation of a hostile environment.

So if external protesters come to campus and engage in protest activity, that creates a hostile environment based on shared ancestry.

Again, viewed from a subjective and objective perspective and under the totality of the circumstances, the campus must respond as required under a federal civil rights law and the hostile environment and prevent its recurrence.

The same note of caution applies to external law enforcement.

If the police come to campus to respond to a protest and the police conduct contributes to a hostile environment for students based on their shared ancestry, again, viewed under the totality of the circumstances from the subjective and objective perspective, the campus has a federal civil rights obligation to respond and to ensure that the hassling environment does not recur.

As we saw this past spring, some campus leaders engaged external law enforcement after student protesters declined to exit willingly or on timelines that campus administrators requested.

And we are actively investigating multiple campuses where external police were recorded engaging in gratuitous violence.

These investigations involve evaluating whether the police activity contributed to a hostile environment and, if so, whether the campus responses were sufficient to end and prevent the occurrence of that environment.

We've also secured several resolution agreements following October seven protest activities with terms that include colleges revising their policies and procedures related to campus protests to ensure nondiscrimination moving forward.

And we've recently resolved several cases and publicized resolutions to help more school communities understand how to comply.

Addressing facts that include, for example, universities not evaluating whether a hostile environment exists warranting university response.

When a university received repeated reports that students that were removed from their dormitory doors and a group of masked individuals vandalized the university's Center for Jewish Life.

Again, we've resolved a case where a university did not evaluate whether hostile environment existed that needed university response.

When protesters chanted on the main campus calling for, quote, Nazi liberation and quote, or when a campus participant in a protest or at a protest shouted at pro-Palestinian protest participant that their friends are, quote, terrorists.

Or when a Palestinian-American student's roommate berated them for weeks about their Palestinian American identity is flaws, and not even evaluating whether a hostile environment exists, not even evaluating whether the participants needed a campus response to redress their injuries, raised serious concerns under the laws that we enforce.

Also to say, when I have heard in recent months from school communities that they hadn't understood before our recent enforcement in this area following October seven, that they needed to respond even to harassing speech or two off campus conduct.

I worry about how they're handling other forms of discrimination, too.

And our investigations confirm the need for that worry.

Last year, for example, we resolved an investigation of a university that did not respond to notice that it had received from a student that an instructor physically attacked the student and verbally harassed the student based on race.

The university took the position incorrectly that it lacked jurisdiction to investigate because the alleged discrimination occurred in a clinical internship program.

We were grateful to correct that misimpression.

But I want to underscore that a graduate student in a university suffered a physical attack and repeated verbal abuse from an instructor because that instructor had prejudice about Asian students.

And the student's university declined to respond until my office got involved.

In my experience, before October seven, we more typically saw rampant race harassment in school district settings than in university settings.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about a recent resolution just from a couple of months ago in the school district where a 13 year old middle school child was repeatedly mocked and taunted by her peers.

The harassing peers called this child blackie spear thrower, monkey gorilla, the N-word.

They taunted her dark skin and they told her that they would date her only if she had been lighter skinned.

Nobody asked, but they shared.

They also mocked her for coming to this country from a country in Africa trying to protect the students privacy.

So not identifying the district or where the students from.

They showed her pictures of malnourished children in Africa and they asked her whether the depicted children were her relatives to taunt her as a result of this harassment.

This child hid in the restroom to avoid classes with the students who were taunting her.

She missed class frequently because of harassment.

She received failing grades that were not later replicated when her family moved her to another school where she was not harassed.

She experienced suicidal ideation and she felt physically ill.

Although her district had repeated notice of this harassing conduct and its impact on the student, her district did not respond for three months.

Other than one teacher talking to one of the harassers which resulted in retaliatory harassment in response, after the three months of notice, when the district finally offered to change some of the student's classes to separate her from harassing peers, this district again did not respond when the student reported that in the new classes new people were harassing her.

These are clear violations of Title six.

I'm very grateful that the student has a thorough, terrific remedy.

The district is also working on how to remedy itself, to move forward and is subject to ongoing federal monitoring from us.

But nobody's baby should experience this kind of harm in school, and we have now for 60 years guaranteed that nobody's baby will experience that kind of harm in school.

And yet yet it persists.

And we know it persists and we know it will persist.

And we so we need some way to make sure that every child who needs us every day in every school has the redress that Congress has guaranteed just to cement it to make sure that we are all clear.

Federal civil rights law protects against harassment of all forms, including harassment, students with disabilities and harassment based on sex.

Just last week, we resolve a case that involved a teacher making a student with a disability.

Since sit in front of the class with tape over the student's mouth and under his eye with a teardrop drawn on the tape of the eye.

As a consequence for the student's disability based, impulsive behavior in the classroom, the teacher held a lit match near the child's face in front of the class, waiting for the child to flinch.

And when asked about this discipline, the teacher said he had responded in a light hearted manner to the student and didn't think the student minded.

The student did mind, and so did we.

So that district has now agreed that it will meet with the child and the child's parents to discuss what remedies are needed for the child to be able to have equal access to education.

It will revise its policies.

It will train its staff.

And it will report to us about how it manages that student and every other student.

Moving forward, we have a case after case after case of harassment of this type.

I'm going to tell you briefly about one more.

And I will say I have been working as a civil rights lawyer and now more recently civil rights enforcer for decades.

And I have rarely, if ever, read facts that are as awful as those in this case I'm about to describe.

They are so awful that I won't tell you some of them, because I don't want to identify the child who is subject to this resolution and who had been subject to this abuse.

But this child had for months, a six month period at the school, been subject to disability slurs, attacks, because the student has a disability and threats because the student has a disability.

Some of them caught on videotape that the school ignored.

The videotaped incident that the school could see was obviously an incident related to the student's physical disability.

And this school's principal still did not treat it as disability based harassment.

So the notice and the refusal to act is the thing that we are worried about that that this child, so many children, so many adults learning in schools are subject to repeated harassment because of who they are.

That our federal laws guarantee will not be their experience and they nonetheless persist.

We also see ugly sex based harassment in school.

You may have heard that my office recently updated the regulations that that govern application of the federal sex discrimination law that we enforce.

I'm very excited about those new updates.

I will report to you in Ohio that we are enjoined from enforcing them in the state of Ohio.

So we'll also talk about the harassment that meets the regulations that preceded these new updated regulations as well.

But just here are two quite ugly examples of recent resolutions that we've secured in this area to confirm what happens in schools and what we need to make sure that we are vigilant about correcting.

Last summer, we resolved a sexual harassment investigation of a community college where we confirmed that a professor had engaged in sexual harassment of the entire class, all of whom were women, by requiring the students to remove their shirts and where only their bras in class and then commenting on their bodies, ostensibly to demonstrate a medical assessment, even though the assessment did not require the clothing removal or the comments on their bodies in response to these reports of harassment that they had experienced at the college immediately placed the professor on paid administrative leave, notified him of the allegations, investigated, offered supports to the students.

I'm saying these things to say the college did all the things that it was supposed to do up to this point and ultimately terminated the professor's employment because they determined that it was sexual harassment and then offered written notice to the first student who had reported to the college about the harassment.

And that's where we had concern.

They didn't tell all the students in the class.

They didn't tell all the affected students what they had done to to correct the environment and ensure that the students would be safe moving forward.

That piece is so important.

People who are affected by a hostile environment need to know that the school is taking steps to remedy it.

That is a crucial piece, and this college missed it, although they had done several other really terrific things.

I'm going to tell you one other truly horrific example that we resolved last fall.

This is in a small cosmetology school.

And I say that to say the law applies to everyone.

It applies to all of us, no matter who we are.

And it applies to all of us and all of the schools that receive federal funds.

So here's a small cosmetology school where we found that a student reported to the head of the school that an instructor sexually assaulted her during class in front of other students.

As part of punitive instruction about how to conduct Brazilian waxing.

After the assault, the instructor made harassing comments to the students again in front of the other students.

I'm not going repeat some of them because they are so gross.

But if there was an ugly atmosphere in the class, the school didn't respond and the student was trying to learn in a situation that was untenable for her.

Ultimately, we found that the school had failed, had, in its procedural failings, had provided none of the rights pursuant to a sexual harassment investigation to either party, to the harasser or to the harassed, and that the student didn't have equal access to education.

Again, I'm very pleased with the school's work moving forward under federal monitoring.

I'm very pleased to be able to work with them to ensure that those facts are not repeated.

I hope ever anywhere.

And I also hope that the facts that I just described are outliers.

But the quantum of noncompliance is not.

And we know that it is not.

So I hope together we, all of us, can quash a myth that merely rightsizing regulations is sufficient to eradicate sexual harassment that takes place in the learning environment in long standing violation of federal law.

We do need to right size regulations, which is what we did when we published our 2024 regulations this year.

And I am pleased that we did that.

We also need vigilant enforcement as well as campus leadership, to fulfill the nondiscrimination guarantee from Congress making education actually equal.

Finally, 52 years after Congress passed its law, harassment is very far from the only form of discrimination that we see in school.

So I'm going to tick through some of the others and move us to conversation.

We have recently addressed a college that treated students of color differently than white students with respect to access to courses and enrollment.

A college that threatened to expel a student with a disability because an artificial intelligence test proctoring program had incorrectly identified the student's disability related rapid eye movement as an indicator of cheating.

Multiple school districts that discipline black and Native American students more harshly than white students for like behaviors.

Multiple colleges that refused to accommodate pregnant students needs for a larger desk to sit in for a clean space.

That is not a bathroom stall to pump breast milk post-pregnancy to leave class a few minutes early to accommodate medical appointments.

A college that dropped a student with a mental health disability from her sports team because of her disability.

A school district that would not let a kindergartner use a wheelchair at school?

Exactly.

A college that denied scholarship eligibility to students with disabilities who needed accommodations.

I share these stories and those related to harassment to underscore what we ask our kids in school to hold while they're trying to learn math.

Our civil rights laws guarantee otherwise.

But we know in my office enforcement experience repeatedly confirms that these experiences of discrimination persist year in and year out.

The hard reality is that every school year is a new opportunity to discriminate.

And just like drivers of cars and the speed, unless they see police vehicles monitoring the roads, discrimination will proliferate absent visible and sustained and effective federal enforcement.

Thomas Jefferson is famous for having said that.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

And I know and I believe with my whole heart that our nation's students deserve the eternal vigilance of the office I lead.

We engage in that vigilance using every authority we have.

Resolving cases, as I have described, issuing and maintaining a web library of policies, resources, explaining what the law is and how we apply it, and giving talks like this one to spread the word.

And that brings me to my ask for all of you.

I hope you, too, will be vigilant about civil rights and this nation's promise of equality and access to federal resources, including in school.

The discrimination I have described today occurs because people don't know something is discrimination or don't believe there will be penalties for discriminating.

We, each of us, including those of us who are not employed to enforce federal civil rights law, have the power to speak up and to speak against discrimination of the various types.

I have described today the students whose hearts I've shared with you would welcome communities who stand for them.

All of the cases I've discussed today and the guidance and recitation of legal standards that we offer point to this.

Our kids in school deserve our attention to ensure nondiscrimination not only because it is the law, but more because it is who we promise to be as a nation.

Students should feel welcome and encouraged to succeed at school.

And we want and we expect schools to be ready to support our students.

Congress repeated promise over six decades now that no person will experience discrimination in school, is righteous and is right, and it is also achievable.

So I hope you will join me in achieving its aims through your own communities, in dinner table conversations, in school communities you associate with and in your wider communities, because it is never wrong to lead for justice.

Thank you for having me today.

I look forward to a conversation.

Thank you.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A and for our live stream and radio audience, are those just joining?

I'm Dan Walter, chief executive here at the City Club.

We've been listening to remarks from Catherine Lehman.

She's the assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education.

We welcome questions from everyone.

City Club members, guests and those of you joining us via live stream at Citi Club dot org or our live radio broadcast on 89.7 WKSU.

That's ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question, you can text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And our team will work it into the program.

And we have our first question, please.

Thank you.

You brought up earlier how even after students were reprimanded, they continued the bullying.

How are districts or faculty or even students supposed to prevent this, like continue to stop them even after they have ignored warnings?

So the law is that if a hostile environment exists based on one of the attendees that that we have jurisdiction over.

A school must take prompt and effective steps to end the harassment and prevent its recurrence.

So if a school district or a university takes steps that are reasonably designed to end harassment and it doesn't end, somebody continues anyway or somebody else harasses somebody, or there's some new instantiation.

Then it has to evaluate that and take additional steps.

There are lots of things that can work.

Typically, the thing that is most effective is to tell a student, Stop.

Explain why it's harmful.

And that is, the school's expectation is not to do it.

But if somebody is continuing anyway, then that can be a disciplinary matter for the school between the school and that student.

But certainly, at minimum, the school needs to evaluate whether any students who are affected by the hostile environment have the equal access to education that the law guarantees for them so they can offer them counseling, they can offer to change their courses, they can offer other hold on campus conversations or a community conversation about civility, about the particular topic.

Offer trainings about the issue at hand.

There's a wide variety of tools within schools, arsenals.

And the main thing is to make sure that it's effective, because that's actually a legal requirement.

Hi.

Hello.

My name is Kyle Williams.

I am a junior M.S.

of course, I'm high school.

And I wanted to know that.

Do you think that social media is also helping?

I mean, helping that I mean, more like giving out the narrative that you can discriminate against people depending on whatever their whatever.

Because nowadays pe more younger people are getting more into politic and seeing that people from the more right side are, you know, discriminating against other people.

So they think that, oh, well, they're doing it.

So that's cool to do.

Who in real life, even though we all know that it's not.

I very much agree that it's not cool to discriminate and I very much worry about the any form so social media or any other where discrimination proliferates.

And I worry every day about messages that we send as a country, that we accept it and that we tolerate it.

So when we don't speak up, we are suggesting that there's no penalty and there's no harm to doing it.

Social media can be a place where that kind of harassment can proliferate.

So, again, word of mouth in a school, so can a newspaper article.

And all those places can also be places where it stops in its tracks because somebody else uses social media to say otherwise.

Somebody else uses the other venues to say otherwise.

So the risk is there everywhere, and we are powerful ourselves to speak against it and to stand for someone who needs us.

All right.

Thank you very much for being here.

I'm Ohio State Senator Kent Smith.

And I've seen in the Ohio General Assembly the state sponsored bullying of trans kids.

And that type of legislation not only passed both chambers, but then Governor DeWine vetoed it.

And the vetoes were overridden.

And the comfort I took was there were some court injunctions to stay that piece of legislation.

But very recently, that legislation, that court injunction was overturned.

And so this legislation is going to take effect unless it obviously gets appealed to a higher court.

And my understanding of these issues was that these court cases were kind of breaking 5050, you know, in some states who had implemented them, these types of of bans.

And so I would welcome your comments on this.

And if you could provide some hope on this topic, I would personally welcome that as well.

Well, thank you for your leadership on equality, and thank you for raising a really crucial issue with us, speaking to a particular state law in Ohio or anywhere else, I will give you the hope that is that federal law trumps state law when it conflicts and the federal guarantee that nondiscrimination is the rule or what applies in schools applies to every kid, including trans kids.

And just to just to say here in Ohio, where the 2020 regulations that the Department of Education offered for a time line, which is our sex discrimination statute, that we enforced those 2020 regulations promised in the preamble that the Department of Education will not tolerate discrimination that meets the definition of sexual harassment in entire life for any student, including LGBT students.

That's functionally a quote from the preamble so that the recognition that the law applies to everyone, the recognition that the law protects everyone, is long standing.

And I'm very proud to enforce it.

And I'm very proud here and in any state to make sure that every kid has it.

That kid needs.

Thank you for coming to Ohio.

My name is Margaret Sanches and I'm with the YWCA of Greater Cleveland.

I was listening and and appalled of all this horrible things that have been happening a year now in today's age.

But I wanted to ask what happened to that teacher at that very school who actually abuse not only, you know, just sexually, but the embarrassment of everything?

Is there legal action or was he just fired or?

Just like a pedophile will be marked and and also be public that that person is a few blocks away from your house.

What happened to him.

That the teacher is no longer employed at that school?

And we are also monitoring that school to make sure that it is in full compliance with the law.

There's implicit in your question, I think, is is a concern about what happens after someone leaves a particular school and doesn't pass and go to another school.

Is there another place where someone is subject to those same harms?

Our jurisdiction extends to what the facts are that we know at the school and to make sure that the school takes the steps sufficient to ensure that its students are safe.

The other sex harassment case that I described to you about the professor who had required the student to all the students to take a shirt off in class, that professor went on to teach at another school.

So we know that we're worrying about it and we watch them.

I have jurisdiction of all the schools that receive federal funds, so I'll be there to watch, do some legal action.

But thank you.

Thank you.

Alireza and Iranian with the Social Justice Institute.

I understand that enforcement is largely reactionary.

I would just love to hear your comments on your office's proactive measures.

Sure.

We we have jurisdiction to investigate when we receive complaints and we see this very high volume.

We also are able to open investigations proactively.

Typically, we do that because we have information that the law may have been violated.

There are a lot of schools in the country.

We don't go on fishing expeditions, but we often get information from communities, from the news, from complaints that for some reason we weren't able to open somebody didn't file a consent form or there's some other reason that we had to dismiss a complaint.

And so we may go back to investigate.

And we have a variety of proactive investigations addressing a variety of topics.

Unsurprisingly, that range from language access rights to equal access to athletics, opportunity for students in school to discrimination, harassment of a variety of types, too.

So it's a it's a very active part of our enforcement docket as well.

And the reality is the main difference in the proactive cases from the complaint investigation cases is that when we opened the proactive cases, we had a reason to think already that the law may have been violated.

So we we're particularly concerned there.

Thank you.

Hi.

My name is Marissa.

I'm an attorney at a civil rights org.

We work with a lot of students who are experiencing bi space incidents at the school.

We're generally working on the ground to make sure that the school is changing the classes for the student.

We're advocating for the suit on the ground.

My question is, if the school is being supportive and we have a good relationship with the school, should we also simultaneously file a complaint with the Department of Education with the caveat that we're kind of in fear that the student will then receive more retaliation, or maybe they're going to be at the center of attention at their school.

Now, like, what do you suggest we do in that case.

Of I'm going to talk out of every side of my mouth on this answer just to say to you, anybody can come to us and bring a complaint to us.

If you are concerned about something is happening at a school that's within our jurisdiction.

You very welcome to come and bring to us.

We will open it and investigate flat out.

If you think that you are working with the school community and securing redress an issue, you may not think you need federal enforcement because the school may be already doing the right thing, which is great.

That's what we like to hear.

You know, it's it's it's really good when schools here concern from their communities and respond that's actually what they should do.

But if you are seeing some success but you think you need more and there's something that we can do, you and anyone can come to us and raise a concern that then you you raised a worry about retaliation.

I just want to be very clear that each of the laws that we enforce, protect against retaliation and also for people who are participating in an inquiry.

So they might not be a complainant themselves, they might be a witness, or they might have facts that they're sharing, or because they're saying that they think their rights or someone else's rights have been violated, we enforce against retaliation.

Also, the reality is that often we get there after.

So the retaliation may have occurred and then we can redress it afterwards.

And that's that's a painful truth.

But there are federal protections against retaliation as well.

Sure.

Hi, my name's Xavier Farmer.

I go to NC Square STEM.

I just want to know that I heard about what the students and teachers did.

The other schools and I just want to know if how as a community we can help those students get through all this and also help with the legal system as well.

And not just have to leave it to just people who work in the court of law.

Thank you.

I love that there are lots of ways.

I mean, there's ways to do it in your school itself and to be visible and vocal in your school itself about the ways that that your student community will support other student communities, people can write op eds, people can share and produce on social media information about their beliefs, about what nondiscrimination should be and how they will be supportive.

Some people have started nonprofits.

One of the complainants who came to us who we helped ultimately became a disability rights advocate because he felt so grateful for what had happened for us.

And he's now helping hundreds, if not millions of other kids to not experience what he experienced as well.

So there's there's lots of ways to move forward.

I heard as we were starting this presentation, several nonprofits in the area also that are working on these kinds of issues can volunteer in a place like that.

You could start your own there.

You know, there are lots of ways to contribute.

I think that there is no way that is unwelcome.

There is no way that's not worth it to to stand up and let other people know that you believe in our long standing aspirations of equality.

And thank you for your presentation today.

My name is Pete family or I'm with Policy Matters Ohio in the honesty for Ohio Education coalition and now my and my question has been so twice by Senator Smith and this young man who just spoke.

But I'm going to just go a bit further.

We have as part of the honesty coalition, we have school board members here today.

So my question had been, you know, my second question was around what can we do?

And thinking we have members of local school boards who are here.

So how would you speak to them about what they can do?

Well, I hope every school board member is a school board member because they care about kids and is is wanting to stand for kids and to make sure that their school communities and not the school community said, I will tell stories about in my next speech.

Right.

So, you know, the first thing that I hope that the school board members can do is to be clear, be visible, be vocal in board meetings about what you expect in your schools, what your policies are for your schools, and what you will ensure for every student.

And we'll also just give you a note of caution, because you raise school board members that we frequently here in our investigations about people who go and testify at school board meetings and raise allegations of discrimination that school districts and I'll respond to that's I will just say it's like, you know, if you're hearing allegations of discrimination, I really recommend that you ensure that there is follow up to make sure that the district is not discriminating.

But the but my hope for the school board members at my kid's school, my hope for the school board members of every school, is that what you're doing is leading your district to actually fulfill the equality principle for every kid.

Thank you.

Hello.

We have a test question.

It says, How has the Office of Civil Rights handled complaints of hostile learning environments for Native American students who attended public schools with native branding, imagery and sports mascots, especially after numerous studies have shown that negative psychological impacts on Native Americans, kids are worth noting, noting that Ohio has the highest concentration of Native Native Americans than any other state in the nation.

So we evaluate under the same hostile environment principle that I've been describing.

So if we hear that there is a mascot, an operation, a school, and people have concerned that the operation of that mascot create a hostile environment for students, we interview kids.

We, you know, we review documents at the school, we take a look at the mascot and we take a look to see if we think that the mascot contributes to an environment that prevents limits or denies access to education in the school community.

We are negotiating a resolution right now with the school district on this very topic, and the facts in this district are jaw dropping to me that, you know, at the time that the board was discussing whether to change the mascot so that it would not be offensive in the community, there were people who showed up at the school board, spat on school board members who were discussing changing the mascot and was very hostile.

Response in the community is very, very challenging issue.

I'm looking forward to seeing that mascot not in operation in that school district moving forward.

But but what we do is, is investigate this question with the same standard that that I was describing for the other kinds of hostile environment cases.

Hi, I'm Hazel Young.

Thank you for your presentation.

Two questions.

One is the schools ever got any have any consequences or penalties associated with their lack of action?

And the second question is, as a parent, if your child is in school and you feel that the school is not addressing issues that are affecting your child, who do you contact?

Yes and yes.

So so on on the first the the penalties that our Congress has given to us would be that ultimately we would withhold federal funds from a school if it refused to voluntarily comply with the law.

The statute requires us to tell a school community what we think they have done to violate the law and to work on trying to secure a voluntary resolution.

And then if they don't, then we can withhold federal funds.

I will say that almost always school communities, when they hear our view that they have violated the law, do work to come into compliance.

We are, for the first time in 27 years in an administrative enforcement proceeding with a state that has declined to come into compliance with its obligations in the COVID context to students with disabilities.

I find that stunning.

I very much look forward to the state coming into full compliance, but where a state or a school or a school district won't, then we work to withhold federal funds.

That's our penalty.

Just to say, though, federal oversight of a school isn't something any school particularly welcomes either, so that you know that there is some penalty involved when there's a voluntary agreement as well.

And then what should a parent to do?

A parent should advocate for their kids in their school, should speak to the school board, speak to the university, support child in what their child needs.

If you're not getting the redress you need, if you think your kid's rights are violated, you can come to the Office for Civil Rights.

If you put us in your search engine, you'll find us.

There's a complaint form that's online.

If you're here in Cleveland, you can work across the street.

Our office is literally across the street and some of the best investigators in the business are right there.

So you can go and if you get help, if you need it.

I'm here from the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland.

My question also kind of got stolen.

I was going to ask more about trans youth, but I guess a broader question I have that I've been seeing kind of interacting not just with youth but with many members of the community, is that those within marginalized communities feel a deep distrust or an access to government.

I was just wondering what the Department of Education is due to doing to try and close that gap or try and increase trust with members of these marginalized communities that often are the victims of, you know, the cases that you see coming to your door.

Well, that's that's several ways.

You Know when I started by saying that we're seeing an all time high in the complaint volume that comes in.

I think that's partly because people trust us.

I think it's partly because people think that we will be there for them.

So I'm pleased to earn that trust.

I'm pleased that people do feel like they can rely on us and believe that we will be there for them.

And I'd like more people to be able to move more quickly and to respond as well.

We also, you know, we put a lot of guidance.

We offer webinars and lots of resources to be able to share information about who we are and what we will do.

And what our job is to work for people.

And it's always a worry that people don't know, don't trust.

I'm sure that the government will be there for them.

It's also one of the reasons that I stressed for this audience that schooling matters.

We're teaching kids how to read.

We're teaching kids, you know, the various lessons that are educational about standards, but we're also teaching them about a relationship to government.

We're teaching them about whether the government believes in them and how much.

So when we don't offer them equality in school, we're doing a terrible disservice to democracy.

And I think that piece is really important for all of us to remember and to invest our energies in making sure that our schools are the places where while we're teaching about math, while we're teaching about English and science, we are also teaching about community and the value in participating and being part of a community because we want our communities to be there for all of us.

Thank you.

Hello.

My name is Jason Tout.

I'm a teacher at MC Squared STEM High School.

I want to start off by saying thank you for all that you do with Dewey.

And my question is, as someone who works with adolescents.

Like, do you have I sorry, I have multiple questions in my head.

Do you have recommendations for ways that they can get involved with, like fighting for social change through, you know, the Office for Civil Rights?

Those kind of connections are always seem like moving targets.

And I'm always looking for ways like to get students involved.

And it's they are the inspiration, right?

Like they have these great ideas and they're not always sure of a direction.

And when I don't have if I have resources for them, that's really exciting.

So if you have ideas for that, I'm also curious if we can get a second question in.

Do you do you have any advice for ways to leverage social media to help kids know, like what their civil rights are and how to advocate for one another because they are their own best advocates and each other's best advocates.

So.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You've got some great kids with you, too, from your school.

So thank you for that, too.

And thank you for what you do.

The taking your first question first.

There's lots of ways to be involved in a community.

And they and they start with the school and then they can expand outside that in the community.

But I'll tell you some stories.

There's a kid I know whose school has posted flags from the various countries that kids families come from who are in the school.

And that kid wanted a trans flag to be posted to and thought that that would be appropriate in that the setting in which the school is displaying these important flags.

The kid went to the principal said the kid that was important and the trans fly to flying now.

So you know that there are ways to advocate in your community for what you believe in, pick your cause and take it to your community and say that you want it.

And often you have the power to make it happen.

If you don't want to do it, only at your school or your school is doing all the things right, and you've seen another school or another community where it might be important to see some changes.

It's okay to write a letter to an editor.

It's okay to show up at a school board.

It's okay to show up at city council and say what you believe in.

Because the laws for you and the laws for you when you're a kid, even as it's for you when you're an adult.

So starting early and advocating this way is, I th how to use social media.

I'm a I'm a little bit of a social media, a lot of people say.

But, you know, for people who use it better than I, there's no reason not to put on your social media, your write your your views about what you think is important and how you think people should be interacting together and how you want your communities to be.

So, you know, I think social media I understand social media to be a space where people can post daily pictures or post family vacations.

It can also be a space where you can post your views and share your views about what you expect in a community and what you want to see.

So I support using it that way too.

Hi, my name is Emily Adams.

I'm an education attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland.

One issue that we sometimes encounter is these laws only apply to schools that are receiving federal funds.

Is there an easy way or do you have suggestions into knowing how a private school is receiving federal funds?

There's not an easy way.

I find in my own office, much less for anybody else but the.

But, you know, here are some things to know.

Every P-12 school receives federal funds, so we can be very confident that the public schools receive federal funds.

Virtually every university receives federal funds because they either receive them themselves for grants or they offer financial aid to students.

And that counts as receiving federal funds.

There's not very many K-12 private schools that receive federal funds.

So you can start with the assumption that they don't.

But if you're worried anyway, you can come to us and we will do the complicated looking up and answer the question to your thank you.

Thank you for speaking.

Assistant Secretary Lehman, thank you so much for joining us today.

I have so many more questions, but we're so grateful for the ones that you answered, the answers you were able to provide.

Before we close it out, I want to recognize me two more each under the the assistant secretaries colleague who's the director of enforcement across and she works across the street.

Thank you so much for making the connection to allow us to host the assistant secretary today.

Forms like this one are made possible by thanks to people like me, but also thanks to all of you who support the City Club.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club dot org.

I'd also like to recognize our students who did a good job recognizing themselves from M.C.

Squared Stone High School.

Great to have you back as the school year getting ready to start.

Thank you so much as well to all the guests at tables hosted by the Cleveland Foundation.

Honesty for Ohio Education, the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland and the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland.

You all are great partners.

Thank you for being here today.

Up next, next Friday on the 23rd, we'll hear from Kate Borders, the president of University Circle, Inc.. And then later on in the month, on Tuesday, August 27th, we are hosting a free forum at the Happy Dog about the redistricting amendment that's going to be on your ballot in November.

The former Supreme Court justice, Maureen O'Connor, will be there, along with others talking about that amendment.

That will be moderated by signal.

Ohio's Nick Castell.

You can learn more about all the forums coming up at the City Club.

At City Club, dawg.

There are a lot of them, so please check it out.

That brings us to the end of our forum today.

Thank you once again.

Assistant Secretary.

Thank you.

Members and friends of the City Club.

Our forums now adjourned.

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