On Wednesday, the ACLU of Delaware partnered with Community Legal Aids Society to file a complaint in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. The complaint maintained that the state’s schools have been resegregating as a direct result of charter policies that discriminate against students with disabilities and students of color.

“What has evolved since the passage of the Charter School Act of 1995 is state-sanctioned preferential treatment for families who are able to navigate the special requirements of charter school admissions,” ALCU Delaware Director Kathleen MacRae said.

Charter schools with selective admissions processes leave out low or average-scoring students, or those whose families may not have the time or resources to write essays for the application, afford school activity fees and uniforms, stay involved and fundraise for the school, according to the complaint.

“These barriers prevent students from low-income African American and Hispanic families from having the same access to high quality charter schools that middle and upper class families have,” MacRae said.

Delaware as a whole has a fairly diverse student body — 51 percent white, 33 percent Black, 11 percent Latino and 3 percent Asian. But three in four schools are “racially identifiable,” the legal definition for a school whose racial composition deviates more than 20 percentage point from its overall district.

Take the Red Clay Consolidated School District in Wilmington, for example, which regularly performs below the states’ average on standardized tests. In 2012, 46 percent of the students were white, 23 percent were Black, 24 percent Latino and nearly 5 percent Asian. The district is home to the high-performing Charter School of Wilmington, where, that same year, those demographics were 63 percent white, 6 percent Black, 3 percent Latino and 26 percent Asian. In 2012, the school, which educates nearly 1,000 students, had no English Language Learners, a couple special education students (0.2 percent) and just over 50 students from low income backgrounds (5 percent). The rest of the 16,000-student district educated 1,600 English Language Learners (10 percent), 2,400 special education students (15 percent) and 2,400 low-income students (15 percent).

The ACLU recommended a moratorium on new charter schools until a desegregation plan is in place, assurance that public education is free without activity or uniform costs, disability recruitment and accessibility in charter schools, and fair funding.