By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court sided on Thursday with a severely epileptic girl who is pursuing a disability discrimination lawsuit against a Minnesota public school district in a ruling that bolsters protections for students with disabilities in American schools.
The 9-0 ruling threw out a lower court’s decision that the Osseo Area Schools district had not discriminated against student Ava Tharpe in violation of two federal disability rights laws, as a lawsuit brought by her parents argued.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the ruling, wrote that the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals erred by requiring students to satisfy a heightened legal standard for disability discrimination claims against schools than is typically required in other contexts.
Federal appeals courts had been divided on whether disability discrimination claims arising in school settings require a heightened legal standard, meaning the stricter requirement had applied in some parts of the country but not others. The Supreme Court ruling harmonizes the standard nationally.
Claims brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that are “based on educational services should be subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts,” Roberts wrote.
Roberts added that nothing in the relevant text of those laws suggests that “such claims should be subject to a distinct, more demanding analysis.”
Roman Martinez, a lawyer for Tharpe, called the ruling “a great win for Ava, and for children with disabilities facing discrimination in schools across the country.”
“We are grateful to the Supreme Court for its decision holding that these children should enjoy the same rights and protections as all other Americans with disabilities,” Martinez said, adding that ruling would “protect the reasonable accommodations needed to ensure equal opportunity for all.”
Tharpe suffers from severe epilepsy that prevents her from attending school before noon due to morning seizures but permits her to engage in school work after that until about 6 p.m.
At issue in the case was whether the legal standard applied by the 8th Circuit in rejecting Tharpe’s discrimination claims was overly strict, and if a less stringent standard should have applied.
When Tharpe and her family lived in Kentucky, her public school district tailored an education plan to her disability that included supplemental evening instruction at home, providing her with the same amount of school time as her peers.
In 2015, her family moved to Minnesota, and Tharpe began attending the public schools in the Osseo Area Schools district in the suburbs of Minneapolis. For years, the district refused to accommodate a request by her parents that she receive evening instruction, leading Tharpe to receive fewer hours of education per day compared to her peers, according to court papers.
Tharpe and her parents in 2021 filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Osseo district of discrimination under two federal disability laws. The lawsuit sought an accommodation from the district giving the girl the equivalent of a full school day, as well as monetary damages.
U.S. District Judge Michael Davis in Minneapolis in 2023 ordered the school district to extend Tharpe’s instructional day until 6 p.m. and to provide compensatory hours of instruction. But the judge rejected Tharpe’s discrimination claims, ruling that her parents had failed to show that the school district satisfied a heightened legal standard of “bad faith or gross misjudgment.”
The 8th Circuit upheld the judge’s ruling, prompting Tharpe and her parents to appeal her disability discrimination claims to the Supreme Court.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
