Boston Public Schools superintendent resigns following lawsuit claiming district shared student information with ICE

Tommy Chang denies sharing student's immigration status with law enforcement

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), officers arrive to a Flatbush Gardens home in search of an undocumented immigrant (John Moore/Getty Images)

The Boston Public Schools superintendent has resigned after a civil rights group sued his district for allegedly providing a student's information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Tommy Chang announced he would quit last week, two years before his contract was set to expire and one day after the lawsuit was filed. He did not specify the reasons for his resignation.

The lawsuit – filed by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice and a coalition of students’ rights groups – accuses the district of sharing information about a “school incident” with the federal immigration agency.

That information was then sent to a network of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies and used as evidence against the student in deportation proceedings, according to the suit.

In a letter to the Boston Public Schools (BPS) community Mr Chang said the district had never shared information about a student’s immigration status with ICE "unless required under law.”

Mr Chang added: “It would be against BPS policy to provide any student records to ICE, and BPS does not have a practice of doing so.”

The lawsuit, according to Mr Chang, focuses on an incident in which the school district assisted the Boston Police Department and Massachusetts State Police – among other law enforcement agencies – in their investigation of gang-related murders in Boston more than two years ago.

The district provided “relevant school police reports” to aid in that investigation, Mr Chang said, but did not reveal any student immigration information.

But Matt Cregor, an attorney for the Lawyers’ Committee, said the issue was not with sharing students' immigration statuses, but with district's handling of students' information.

The Lawyer's Committee, he said, was suing in order to “know the difference between who is being referred to the principal's office, and who is being referred to ICE”.

He added that the committee had originally filed a public records request for information on what data the school district was submitting to BRIC. They filed their lawsuit only when that request was denied.

But the organisation also denied advocating for Mr Chang’s removal, saying in a statement it was the City of Boston’s policies and practices that were at issue – not the actions of a single administrator.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said in a statement that Mr Chang’s resignation was a mutual decision, but did not comment on the lawsuit against the district. A spokesperson for the superintendent's office declined to comment on the record.

Mr Chang took over as BPS superintendent in 2015, after working in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He was awarded a five-year contract – the longest of any in the country for the head of a large urban district, according to the BPS website. But his two-and-a-half-year tenure was marred by controversy, on everything from earlier school start times to a scathing IRS audit of the district.

In a letter announcing his resignation, Mr Chang remarked on his journey from a young Taiwanese immigrant to the leader of a major public school system.

“Public school teachers guided me in a journey that gave me one of the greatest responsibilities a human being can have – the education of a city’s children,” he wrote. “In this moment more than ever, I want every immigrant child to know that’s the country America strives to be, must be, and will be.”