OCR Is Still Enforcing Title IX, and Noncompliance Still Abounds

Investigating the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights Title IX enforcement records, journalist Tyler Kingkade discovered that the agency has a resolved at least 70 cases and found many problems with the sexual misconduct policies and practices of school districts, colleges and universities. In higher education, examples of violations included things like unjustifiable delay and other impairment of the complainants' rights, but even more alarming problems were discovered in the agency's investigations into institutions at the K-12 level. Kingkade found that six school districts didn't even investigate sexual misconduct at all.  One major metropolitan school district, in District of Columbia, simply files incident reports with local law enforcement. Elsewhere in the country are examples of school districts whose Title IX coordinators haven't worked on any sexual misconduct issues in the last 11 years, and another whose principal only calls the Title IX coordinator for complaints about equity in sports.  Kingkade reports several examples of egregious sexual misconduct -- some perpetrated by teachers, others by students -- that school districts knew about but failed to investigate or provide help to the victims.

These findings are important to highlight for a couple of reasons. First, they remind us that we shouldn't leave school districts out of the public and political scrutiny that colleges and universities already receive on these issues. Second, it's proof that Title IX continues to be necessary to challenge the lack of attention that school and university administrators give to sexual misconduct cases. This disconnect was noted in the article by former OCR Director Catherine Lhamon, who said, "The department is still documenting very serious sexual violence and unbelievable harm to students today in school, [but] its policy arm is telling schools to stop looking for that...The need is exponentially higher, and OCR is turning in the other direction."  If the agency follows through on its proposed regulations focused campus hearing due process and narrowing the scope of misconduct that falls under Title IX, it will be hard to reconcile those changes with the pattern of problems that its own enforcement efforts continue to reveal.