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This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Content warning: This story describes in detail incidents of racial and sexual harassment.

In Colorado, students taunted their Black classmates by playing whipping sounds on their cellphones and saying they should be shot “to make us a better race.”

The only two Black students in a small district in Ohio were called the N-word by white peers starting on their first day. They got accustomed to hearing slurs like “porch monkey” and being told to go pick cotton.

And at a school in Illinois, white students included Confederate flags in their PowerPoint presentations for class assignments and shook a school bus as Black students were exiting to try to make them tumble off.

In each case, the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights arm investigated and concluded that school districts didn’t do enough to stop racial hostility toward Black students. It struck agreements with those districts to require changes and to monitor them for months, if not years. They were among roughly 50 racial harassment cases the OCR resolved in the last three years.

But that sort of accountability has ended under the second administration of President Donald Trump. Nearly a year since he took office, the department’s Office for Civil Rights has not entered into a single new resolution agreement involving racial harassment of students, a ProPublica analysis found.

“The message that it sends is that the people impacted by racial discrimination and harassment don’t matter,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, an attorney with a Texas nonprofit that has worked with families who’ve filed racial harassment complaints with OCR.

The Education Department had been investigating nine complaints in the Lubbock-Cooper school district tied to racial discrimination, but Duggins-Clay said she and others involved in the cases haven’t heard from the department this year.

The OCR regularly resolves dozens of racial harassment cases a year and did so even during Trump’s first administration. In the last days of the Biden administration, OCR workers pushed to close out several racial harassment agreements, including one that was signed by the district the day after Trump was inaugurated. With Trump in office, the agency has shifted to resolving cases involving allegations of discrimination against white students.

At the same time, the administration has been clear about its goal of dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs across all facets of American life. This has been especially pronounced at schools and colleges, where the administration has also eroded protections for transgender students and considerations for historically disadvantaged groups.

Internal department data obtained by ProPublica shows that more than 1,000 racial harassment investigations initiated in previous administrations still are open. Most of those complaints involve harassment of Black students.

Not only has the Education Department failed to enter into any resolution agreements in those racial harassment cases, but it also has not initiated investigations of most new complaints. Since Jan. 20, it has opened only 14 investigations into allegations of racial harassment of Black students. In that same time period, more than 500 racial harassment complaints have been received, the internal data shows.

The Education Department did not respond to ProPublica’s questions and requests for comment. Trump is working to shutter the Education Department, and the agency has not updated online case information........

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