The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights in the United States of America logged a record 19,000 discrimination complaints in the last fiscal year from October 1, 2021 to September 30, 2022, according to media reports.
The complaints alleged discrimination based on disability, race or sex, among others, and as per officials from the department, reflect grievances that were amassed during the worst public health crisis in a century and the most divisive civil rights climate in decades, reported The New York Times.
This number is more than double the previous year's and breaks the record of 16,000 filed in the fiscal year 2016, Xinhua news agency quoted The New York Times report, which was published on Sunday, January 1.
"The latest indicator of how the social and political strife roiling the country is reverberating in the nation's schools," the newspaper said, noting that the surge reversed the decline in complaints filed to the office under the administration of former President Donald Trump.
"The complaints were logged as schools struggled to recover from pandemic-related closures and add to the declining test scores and growing mental health challenges that display the fragility in large parts of the country's education system," it said.
"It reflects the confidence in the Office for Civil Rights as a place to seek redress... At the same time, the scope and volume of harm that we're asking our babies to navigate are astronomical," the report quoted Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights, as saying.
