The courthouse doors are now open wider to parents seeking to challenge how schools handle the particular needs of disabled children.
The six Supreme Court cases decided this morning — leaving 21 argued cases remaining on the Court’s docket to decide in the next three weeks — produced no great fireworks and a lot of unanimity, with only Justice Neil Gorsuch writing lone dissents in two of the cases. The biggest news comes from A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, Independent School District No. 279, in which Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion, with concurring opinions by Justices Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor. The net result of A.J.T. is to make it easier for parents of disabled and special-needs children to sue schools for disability discrimination.
The plaintiff in A.J.T., a child who suffers from epilepsy so severe that she cannot take lessons before noon because of seizures, received evening lessons at home until she moved to Minnesota, where school officials refused the additional hours of instruction. She sued, and the Court today threw out a decision tossing her case.
Two federal antidiscrimination statutes, the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), allow lawsuits against certain federally funded institutions (including schools) for discrimination “by reason of” a disability. A third federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — formerly the “Education of the Handicapped Act” — imposes more detailed rules about providing special-needs and disabled kids with individualized educational programs (IEPs) and imposes an administrative process for resolving challenges to an IEP.
The standard for noneducational discrimination claims under the ADA or the Rehabilitation Act is “deliberate indifference,” which, as the Court noted, “does not require a showing of personal ill will or animosity toward the disabled person” but only that “the defendant disregarded a strong likelihood that the challenged action would result in a violation of federally protected rights”(quotations and citations omitted). The Eighth Circuit, however, adhered to a rule it had adopted in a 1982 case under which claims under these same statutes had to show “bad faith or gross misjudgment” if they arose from the schools context covered by IDEA. At the time, that court cited both the need to avoid undermining IDEA’s procedural requirements and the “a proper balance between the rights of handicapped children, the responsibilities of state educational officials, and the competence of courts to make judgments in technical fields” involving “accepted standards among educational professionals.”
The Court today is more serious about the texts of statutes and less apt to defer to professional “standards” when the law does not require doing so. Thus, just as the Court ruled last week that all employment discrimination cases must follow a single standard for discrimination regardless of whether the employee is a member of a majority or minority group — given that the statute says nothing about such a distinction — the Court likewise concluded, as Roberts wrote, that “ADA and Rehabilitation Act claims based on educational services should be subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts. Nothing in the text of [either statute] suggests that such claims should be subject to a distinct, more demanding analysis. . . . There is no textual indication that the protections of either disability discrimination statute apply with lesser force to certain qualified individuals bringing certain kinds of claims” (quotations and citations omitted; italics in original).
Moreover, as Roberts noted, Congress was careful in IDEA not to make it an exclusive avenue for resolving these disputes, which it could have done if it believed that ADA or Rehabilitation Act discrimination lawsuits were unduly disruptive to IDEA’s statutory scheme.
The Court also rejected the school district’s effort to argue that the overall standard for all ADA or Rehabilitation Act discrimination cases should be higher, but only because the issue hadn’t been presented earlier; that question remains open for another day. Thomas, in an opinion joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, argued that another case should consider both whether the current rule allows for too many lawsuits without proof of intentional discrimination and whether Congress, in the spending clause, really has the power to impose such detailed rules on local schools. Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote to take the opposite view: that the current standard is correct and the statute does not require intentional discrimination, just intentional acts that foreseeably result in discriminatory effects.
The Court may return to that fray another day, and the other five justices did not weigh in on it. For now, however, the courthouse doors are open wider to parents seeking to challenge how schools handle special-needs kids.