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Top U.S. high school hit with civil rights, discrimination suit

The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a prestigious Alexandria, Va. high school, has been hit with a federal civil rights lawsuit, the Huffington Post reports. The Coalition of The Silence, a local minority advocacy group, and the NAACP filed a complaint to the U.S. Department of Education Monday alleging that black and Latino students, as well as students with disabilities, are being shut out of the school because Fairfax County consistently fails to identify them for gifted programs.

“Poor Latino kids are not being identified, and I worry part of that is language [1],” Martina Hone of the Coalition of Silence told NBC Washington. “African-American kids are not being identified. I’m worried that’s race.”

The complaint alleges that the county “…essentially operates a network of separate and unequal schools [2],” and that “for decades, these students have been grossly and disproportionately underrepresented in admission to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.”

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