Boston Settles With Federal Officials in ELL Probe

The U.S. departments of Justice and Education reached a settlement agreement today on how the Boston public school system will fix violations of the civil rights of English-language learners.

Since 2003, the Boston district “has failed to properly identify and adequately serve thousands of English Language Learner (ELL) students as required by the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the Justice Department said in a press release issued Oct. 1. The school district cooperated with a joint investigation by the two federal departments into those violations.

The 44-page agreement requires that, starting this school year, all of Boston’s 135 schools provide services to English-language learners, even if the schools don’t have large numbers of such students, something that wasn’t happening before. It also includes a mandate that the district offer “compensatory services” to students who previously had been deemed as “opting out” of language services that they were entitled to receive under federal law. Those make-up services will be offered during out-of-school hours—including after school, during summer, and on Saturdays—to make up for the ELL help that students should...