Dive Brief:
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A south New Jersey school district is under a federal civil rights investigation after an 11-year-old girl died by suicide in 2023. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey is looking into Mount Holly Township School District over potential discrimination based on race, national origin and sex in public schools, according to a letter it sent to the district in September.
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The district had until Nov. 4 to respond to the office's inquiry with information on school and district-level policies for handling and preventing student incidents of race and sex-based harassment, intimidation, bullying, discrimination and misconduct, according to the letter.
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The office is also investigating the role of school resource officers in responding to and preventing such incidents, as well as district practices related to supervising and monitoring — electronic and otherwise — of students on school buses.
Dive Insight:
The U.S. Department of Justice's investigation into Mount Holly Township School District — which serves just over 1,000 students across three schools — comes alongside a lawsuit filed last year by the mother of Felicia LoAlbo-Melendez, the 11-year-old who died by suicide. Upon filing the lawsuit, Felicia's mother, Elaina LoAlbo, described to local media outlets the district's alleged inaction as “willful ignorance” that allowed "a culture of bullying” in Mount Holly.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for New Jersey declined to comment after multiple requests, and Mount Holly Township School District did not respond to K-12 Dive's requests for comment.
In recent years, many school districts have faced such negligence lawsuits over allegations of unaddressed bullying after cases of student suicide, resulting in millions of dollars in settlements with grieving families.
These cases have impacted districts and communities small and large nationwide. California's 3,500-student El Segundo Unified School District, for instance, reached a $1 million settlement in 2022, and New Jersey's Rockaway Township School District, which serves around 2,400 students, had to pay out $9.1 million last year.
In Farmington, Utah, the 73,000-student Davis School District last year agreed as part of a settlement to pay to the family of a 10-year-old student who committed suicide after alleged bullying over her race and disability.
Federal civil rights investigations following cases of suicide, however, have less commonly been in the public eye.
The Justice Department in 2021 investigated and settled with Davis School District after it found "serious and widespread" racial harassment of Black and Asian students — including by district staff in addition to peers. Those student populations each made up roughly 1% of the district's 73,000 students.
The investigation "found hundreds of documented uses of the N-word, among other racial epithets, derogatory racial comments, and physical assaults targeting district students at dozens of schools."
In recent years, and especially following the COVID-19 pandemic, district leaders have expressed concern of reported rises in bullying. In addition, the FBI found in a 2024 report that schools were the third most-common known location for hate crimes in 2022 and a frequent location for hate crimes against Black, Jewish and LGBT individuals particularly.
The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has also raised concerns about student harassment related to race, national origin and shared ethnic characteristics, especially in light of the Israel-Hamas war that triggered an increase in complaints and reports of such student bullying.
OCR's shared ancestry Title VI civil rights investigations have skyrocketed since October 2023, when the war began. Between October 2023 and Sept. 30, 2024, the department opened 49 Title VI shared ancestry investigations into K-12 schools for fiscal year 2024. In the 2023 fiscal year, the office had opened only 15 cases for this subset of Title VI investigations.
The department currently has over 2,500 open K-12 Title VI investigations, according to the OCR website.
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