The investigation began with a racist slur and a punch to the face. A white high school student at California’s Lodi Unified School District spat a racial epithet at a black classmate, who lashed out with his fists in the school hallway the next morning.

The white student didn’t fight back physically, but both were suspended. When school officials doled out harsher punishment to the black student, however, he claimed racial discrimination in a complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Because of his race, the student alleged, he was punished more severely.

Although OCR didn’t rule in the black student’s favor, it launched a compliance review spanning several years, reaching a settlement with the district in 2016 to address “concerns that it disciplines African-American students more harshly than white students.”

Lodi school officials, along with district leaders across the country, had been warned. A 2014 “Dear Colleague” guidance letter from the Obama administration’s Education and Justice departments advised that discipline policies could constitute “unlawful discrimination” under federal civil rights law if they didn’t explicitly mention race but had “a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.”

Read the full article by Mark Keierleber about civil rights in school from The 74