It took Waldina Mendoza and her family a year or so to settle in Norfolk after coming to the United States from Honduras.
Once here, she immediately set about getting her twin sons into Norfolk Public Schools.
“I didn’t study in my country, and all a mother wants for her children is to let them study,” Mendoza told WHRO through a translator.
Her dream was shattered on the first day of school.
According to her, a group of students surrounded one of her 17-year-old sons in the cafeteria at Norview High School. One student yanked a hat backward off of her son’s head so hard it caused him a back injury that required a trip to Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters and still causes pain.
Neither of Mendoza’s sons has returned to school since that first day in September. She doesn’t believe they’d be safe there and said the school district has denied her requests to transfer them to a different high school. The district filed truancy charges late last year against Mendoza for keeping her boys out of school.
Mendoza believes her son was targeted because of his race and national origin and school administrators dismissed her concerns for similar reasons. Her family’s story echoes other accounts from Latino families about violence at Norview High School that led to a federal investigation last year.
But now, the Trump administration has put a hold on federal civil rights investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice, leaving concerned advocates wondering about the status of the investigation into bullying and discrimination in Norfolk’s public schools.
Investigators from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division initiated a two-pronged investigation into Norfolk Public Schools’ handling of discrimination and violence last year concerning students targeted for their sex and gender identity as well as their race and national origin.
The Trump administration recently put a hold on some ongoing civil rights cases under investigation by the Justice Department. Under new Attorney General Pam Bondi, several memos issued to DOJ staffers in recent weeks sought to realign the department’s priorities, becoming hostile to immigrants and the transgender community, among other groups.
The DOJ has refused to confirm the status of the Norfolk investigation.
According to emails obtained by WHRO News, the case started early in 2024 and was ongoing as of December, when investigators traveled to Norfolk to interview school staff and students.
In the meantime, Norfolk Public Schools expanded Hispanic outreach efforts and brought in outside groups to work with Black and Latino students while denying that any of the incidents were racially motivated.
Advocates and families say it’s not enough and administrators still aren’t taking the violence their students face seriously.
NPS SAYS IT’S ADDRESSING ISSUES
In her first interview with WHRO since a 2024 report detailed the violence against Latino students at Norview High School, Norfolk Public Schools Superintendent Sharon Byrdsong maintained there isn’t any racial motivation behind violence in the schools.
“Clearly, from the data, there’s no racial animus between our Hispanic children and our Black students,” Byrdsong said. “To formulate the narrative that our Black and Hispanic children are not getting along, that is absolutely false, and I think that’s a dangerous narrative to put in our community.”
Latino students who spoke with WHRO claimed they were often targeted specifically by Black students.
When pressed on what informed the conclusion that none of the incidents of violence at Norview had any racial basis, Byrdsong simply repeated that she had discussions with the principal, Tori Jacobs-Sumbry, and had reviewed “her data.”
Data available from the state about violence in schools is limited. While there are rules about how districts must report instances of violence, which Byrdsong said the district follows, publicly available data doesn’t document who victims of violence were, for instance.
Byrdsong said the district has taken steps to address issues in the Hispanic community. For one, she said they expanded partnerships with the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities, bringing the group in to do professional development with staff and group work with students.
“We wanted to make sure that our kids are getting along, and we also wanted to determine why this narrative was being placed within the community,” she said, speaking about the assertion the violence against Latino students was racially motivated.
Jacobs-Sumbry said the school started a family engagement night in February 2024, targeted in part at Hispanic families. She said the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities brought 30 to 40 students to an off-site location to talk about “a sense of belonging and just being able to come together as a diverse student group.”
Byrdsong and Jacobs-Sumbry said the district’s English as a Second Language department has gone to Norview to work with teachers on best practices to support English learner students, as well as helping at events like Open House. The district opened a “welcome center” at the school to help parents enroll their children or who need to otherwise speak to someone in Spanish.
“Our population of English learners is growing significantly, and we want to be in a position to be able to support our children and our families to the best of our ability,” Byrdsong said.
At Norview, for instance, Hispanic students make up 17.3% of the student body, according to state enrollment data. That’s up from last year and nearly double the percentage of a decade ago.
In her most recent budget proposal, Byrdsong suggests hiring 33 new ESL teachers and creating another International Welcome Center at the Academy of International Studies at Rosemont for non-English-speaking students and families.
EMAILS SHOW PATTERN OF DELAYS; FATE OF INVESTIGATIONS UNCLEAR
While Norfolk Public Schools is now adding more services for its Spanish-speaking student population, the federal investigation began in early 2024.
Emails obtained by WHRO show the Educational Opportunities division of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Office first requested documents from Norfolk Public Schools in early 2024 about sex and gender identity bullying and harassment. Later in the year, the inquiry expanded to include discrimination against race and national origin.
Frustration from federal investigators grew more evident across dozens of emails between February and August, as Norfolk Public Schools missed no fewer than four deadlines to provide documents related to incidents of student harassment and bullying.
Investigators ultimately suggested Norfolk officials weren’t sharing everything they had with the Department of Justice. Byrdsong told WHRO that was a misunderstanding.
Norfolk schools officials submitted two batches of documents in August 2024. Following that, Department of Justice attorney Sandy James accused the district of collecting but not providing records requested by the department.
“On July 3, the district provided a spreadsheet detailing 272 incidents that were responsive to this request. In this spreadsheet, the district notes that it has underlying documents for 220 of these incidents. However, to date, the district has not provided the underlying documents related to most of the incidents in the spreadsheet,” James wrote.
The next email in the chain is redacted in its entirety, like many in the thousands of pages of documents NPS provided to WHRO as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. The district cited attorney-client privilege for that August email.
Byrdsong told WHRO federal investigators had everything they asked for and didn’t know it. The district turned everything over and cleared things up with investigators, she said.
Investigators did not respond to requests to verify this account.
“Per longstanding policy, the Department of Justice does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations,” wrote Scottie Howell, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Eastern District of Virginia.
Emails from the last week of August 2024 mention a Zoom meeting between federal investigators and district leaders to hash out the issue. An Aug. 30 email from James following that call indicates the DOJ did get access to additional documents. It’s unclear what those were, whether they were the documents DOJ suspected were withheld and what conversation happened on that Zoom call.
Investigators visited Norfolk later in December, about a month before the Trump administration took over, to interview students, parents and district staff.
Byrdsong told WHRO that DOJ investigators haven’t contacted the district since that December visit.
She said she also didn’t know the status of a separate and previously unreported federal Department of Education investigation that the department notified the district about in June 2024. Complaints about disability discrimination triggered that investigation, though redactions in emails from Norfolk schools make it impossible to glean the details of the complaints.
Calls to Revan Austin, the Department of Education attorney who contacted NPS to inform them of the investigation about disability discrimination, were not returned.
The Department of Education has not publicly posted any resolution, though it posted statements of resolution in similar cases elsewhere throughout last year.
CONTINUED CONCERNS
Patricia Bracknell heads the Chamber for Hispanic Progress in Norfolk and is a vocal advocate for the families of Latino students at Norview High School who experienced violence.
She said the school district’s administrators continue to brush off Hispanic families with safety concerns.
“I don’t believe in their intentions of creating a more safe environment for these families,” Bracknell told WHRO.
She said these incidents continue as administrators dismiss concerns. Bracknell is worried that the DOJ dropped the investigation since Trump took office and, as a result, nothing will change.
Waldina Mendoza’s son has been cutting hair for neighborhood kids since she’s kept him home from school. He hopes to go to barber school, which he did in Honduras, but can’t in the U.S. without a high school diploma.
WHRO isn’t using Mendoza’s son’s name because he’s concerned it will make him a target again.
Mendoza’s other son, 17-year-old Jonathan, said he has a knack for computers and considered joining the Navy after graduating. That would allow him to give his mom a better future, Jonathan said in Spanish through Bracknell.
But Waldina Mendoza said her family is stuck. They’re financially unable to move from their apartment in Ocean View into a different attendance zone. The district refused to allow a transfer for her boys to attend a different school, and she’s unwilling to send them back to a school where she worries they could be hurt even worse the next time.
At a recent court hearing for her truancy charges, a judge ordered Mendoza to send her sons back to Norview.
She told the judge through a court interpreter that she doesn’t feel like her sons are safe there and the district has denied requests to relocate them.
“It’s not up to her to decide if they’re safe or not. I will not have children not going to school,” Judge Robert Smith said during the March 19 hearing.
Smith gave Mendoza three days to re-enroll them both or face the consequences, which could include hundreds of dollars in fines.
Standing in the courthouse afterward, Mendoza could only reiterate her and her sons’ fear of what could await them upon returning to Norview.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said through her attorney.
Some interviews for this piece were conducted in Spanish with the help of interpreters.
Norfolk Public Schools is a member of the Hampton Roads Educational Telecommunications Association, which holds WHRO’s license. Learn more about WHRO’s standards of journalism.
