The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously sided with a Minnesota family that has been battling their local school district over the education of their daughter in a decision that could make it easier for other parents of disabled children to seek damages from schools under federal disability laws.
The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, rejected a lower court ruling that had set a high legal bar to bring those claims, essentially shielding school districts from certain suits involving disability discrimination.
The teenager at the center of the case, identified in court papers as Ava, has a rare form of epilepsy that made it impossible for her to attend school in the morning. Her parents requested that the district accommodate her disability with evening instruction, but school officials initially declined to do so.
The parents filed a successful complaint under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which resulted in a decision requiring the school to offer evening instruction.
Ava’s parents then sued the district for damages under the Americans with Disability Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. That latter law is what allows parents and schools to develop “504 plans” to accommodate students with disabilities.
A federal district court ruled with the schools, holding that the family had not demonstrated that school administrators operated with “bad faith or gross misjudgment,” a higher legal standard than the “deliberate indifference” threshold that courts apply in other disability discrimination contests. The 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision and the parents appealed to the Supreme Court in September.
In its decision on Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that the same standard that applies in other disability contexts should also apply in schools. It doesn’t mean that the families will necessarily win their cases, but it will make it easier for them to bring their claims.
“That our decision is narrow does not diminish its import” for the family involved in the litigation “and ‘a great many children with disabilities and their parents,’” Roberts wrote.
“Together they face daunting challenges on a daily basis,” Roberts added. “We hold today that those challenges do not include having to satisfy a more stringent standard of proof than other plaintiffs to establish discrimination under Title II of the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.”
Five federal appeals courts have required parents to meet the higher standard to proceed with litigation and two others apply the lower standard.
Public school districts, worried about limited resources, had argued at the Supreme Court that the way to handle the case was not to lower the standard for families like the one involved but rather to raise it for everyone else. But the court dismissed that argument as arriving too late in the litigation.
The court’s “resolution of these issues could have significant ramifications for both disability law and discrimination law more generally,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “That these issues are consequential is all the more reason to wait for a case in which they are squarely before us and we have the benefit of adversarial briefing.”
Two years ago, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with a student who is deaf and also sought to sue his school for damages. That case dealt with whether students could pursue those claims for damages before they exhaust administrative processes required under another law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
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