New federal guidelines aimed at reducing high rates of discipline for students with disabilities affirm that schools are responsible for the discriminatory behavior of police and school resource officers on campus. That includes incidents when schools refer students to law enforcement, an action that can lead to school-related arrests, criminal charges, fines or citations that […]

Willie Head is so infuriated with President Joe Biden and other Democrats that he’s considering not voting for the party in future elections.  “I’m here to say for the record, I can’t, I will not vote Democratic again for this kind of results from my Democratic congressional people, and I’m asking everybody of color to […]

The past two years have been difficult for everyone, but they’ve been particularly rough for transgender households. New data released by the Census Bureau shows that trans adults are reporting startling rates of depression, hunger and unemployment.  In many cases, the situation has worsened for transgender adults over the past year while improving for other […]

For decades in Houston, where resident Bryan “Lucas” Parras grew up near the city’s shipping channel, neighborhoods have faced the cumulative impacts of toxic emissions. The area is crammed with industrial facilities, chemical plants and oil refineries. Pollution has become such an ingrained part of life, Parras said, that residents on the city’s East End […]

Each year, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project asks the Texas Secretary of State for about 25,000 voter registration applications, which it distributes as part of the organization’s efforts to empower Latinos to participate in the democratic process. This year, the organization received a surprising response: There weren’t enough applications to go around. A sweeping […]

Fast-rising prices for gas, food and most everything else is hitting low-income households hardest. But the Federal Reserve’s effort to rein in inflation with higher interest rates could hurt those same households. Inflation affecting countries across the globe this year has been driven in part by a mismatch in supply and demand. Bottlenecks in supply […]

Georgia state Sen. Kim Jackson has pretty much given up on the idea that Black Georgians might some day receive reparations for past injustices.  “In Georgia, the concept of reparations is a politically dead issue. It will not move,” said Jackson, a Black woman who comes from a farming family and sits on the Senate […]

From Britney Spears to Wendy Williams, financial guardianships and conservatorships have entered the limelight as legal tools with the potential for abuse.  These high-profile cases have led to growing calls for reform. Disability rights organizations also have long advocated for less restrictive alternatives to guardianship for people with disabilities. Guardians, in some states called conservators, […]

When Melynda Price thinks of Juneteenth, she thinks of hope. She thinks of home. She thinks of heritage. A legal scholar at the University of Kentucky, Price is a fifth-generation Texan whose great-great-grandmother was enslaved in Southeast Texas. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 declared more than three million enslaved people living in […]

Within a week in mid-May, there was a mass shooting in Buffalo, a stock-market selloff on Wall Street and a heated primary election in Pennsylvania. In the midst of it all, the Government Accountability Office released a report with an unsettling conclusion. The government watchdog agency told Congress that it couldn’t figure out if the […]

With the U.S. Supreme Court likely to overturn Roe v. Wade in the coming months, reproductive rights will be determined by individual states, and the scope goes beyond abortion. For more than a decade, some states have sharply increased criminal investigations of pregnancy loss, including miscarriages, stillbirths and self-induced abortions.  Prosecutions have overwhelmingly targeted pregnant […]

A law meant to correct the harm done by decades of discrimination in bank loans is undergoing a long-awaited overhaul.  Fair lending advocates have said it’s too easy for banks to get a passing grade under the Community Reinvestment Act, and that communities of color continue to be disproportionately denied home loans. Now federal regulators […]

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of Plyler v. Doe, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring public schools to educate all children, regardless of their immigration status. But with the high court potentially overturning decades-old precedent in the Roe v. Wade abortion decision, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sees a potential opening to undo Plyler, […]

Aniisha Sarkissian said she quit her job delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service because managers wouldn’t pay her for all the hours she worked. Years later the agency told her it was the reverse: that she was overpaid and owed the Postal Service more than $400. Sarkissian, of Phoenix, is among the dozens of […]

For six days last month, Kentucky was the only state in the nation without access to abortion services. A sweeping law that banned abortions after 15 weeks also included new requirements for providers, which the state’s two clinics said they couldn’t meet.  Reproductive health organizations worked to overcome new barriers to abortion in one of […]