Latest news with #OsseoAreaSchools
Yahoo
27-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
In unanimous decision, Supreme Court makes it easier for students with disabilities to sue schools
WASHINGTON − A unanimous Supreme Court on June 12 made it easier for families to use the Americans with Disabilities Act to sue schools for damages, ruling a lower court used too tough a standard to dismiss a lawsuit from a student with a rare form of epilepsy. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts said the student's family did not have to show the school acted in 'bad faith or gross misjudgment." That's more difficult to prove than the 'deliberate indifference' standard courts often use when weighing other types of disability discrimination claims. The court also rejected an argument from the school that would have raised the bar for all victims of disability discrimination rather than lowered it for educational instruction claims. The case, A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, was closely watched by disability rights groups. They say the courts have created a 'nearly insurmountable barrier' for schoolchildren and their families. But schools across the country worry that making lawsuits easier to win will create a more adversarial relationship between parents and schools in the difficult negotiations needed to balance a student's needs with a school's limited resources. In this case, Gina and Aaron Tharpe said they spent years asking Osseo Area School District to accommodate their daughter's severe cognitive impairment and rare form of epilepsy called Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome. Her seizures are so frequent in the morning that she can't attend school before noon. A previous school in Tennessee shifted Ava's school day so it started in the afternoon and ended with evening instruction at home. But the Tharpes say the Minnesota school system, where she is currently enrolled, refused to provide the same adjustment. As a result, she received only 4.25 hours of instruction a day, about two-thirds of what nondisabled students received. When the Tharpes sued under the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, lower courts dismissed the case. More: For students with disabilities, what's the difference between IEPs and 504 plans? Judges on the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said their hands were tied because of a 1982 circuit decision – Monahan v. Nebraska − that said school officials need to have acted with 'bad faith or gross misjudgment' for suits to go forward involving educational services for children with disabilities. The Tharpes 'may have established a genuine dispute about whether the district was negligent or even deliberately indifferent, but under Monahan, that's just not enough,' the appeals court said. More: Will a Texas-led legal fight over gender dysphoria threaten disabled student protections? Hundreds of district court decisions across the country have been litigated under that standard, with most of them ending in a loss for the families, according to the Tharpes' attorneys. The Justice Department backed the Tharpes' argument that there should not be a different standard for disability discrimination cases involving education. The school district's attorneys pushed the court to apply a tougher standard for all cases rather than lower the bar for cases like Ava's. But because the school district didn't make that argument until after the court agreed to take the case, the justices said they could not consider it. 'We will not entertain the District's invitation to inject into this case significant issues that have not been fully presented,' Roberts wrote for the court. Two justices said the school district raised an important issue that the court should consider in a future case. 'Whether federal courts are applying the correct legal standard is an issue of national importance, and the District has raised serious arguments that the prevailing standards are incorrect,' Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that was 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.' Ava's lawyers had warned that the school's argument threatened 'to eviscerate protections for every American who endures disability discrimination – and quite possibly other kinds of discrimination too.' Roman Martinez, who represented the Tharpes, said the court's decision "gets the law exactly right, and it will help protect the reasonable accommodations needed to ensure equal opportunity for all." 'We are thrilled for Ava and her family," Martinez said in a statement. The court's action revives, but does not settle, the Tharpes' lawsuit. Attorneys for the district said the school had not shown 'deliberate indifference," the lower standard. Although the school declined to provide after-school support at Ava's home, officials said they offered other measures to accommodate her needs while 'effectively utilizing scarce resources shared among all students, including others with disabilities.' This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court makes it easier to sue schools in disability cases
CBS News
13-06-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Minnesota girl with epilepsy wins Supreme Court ruling expected to make disability lawsuits against schools easier
A teenage girl from Minnesota who has a rare form of epilepsy won a unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Thursday that's expected to make it easier for families of children with disabilities to sue schools over access to education. The girl's family says that her school district didn't do enough to make sure she has the disability accommodations she needs to learn, including failing to provide adequate instruction in the evening when her seizures are less frequent. But lower courts ruled against the family's claim for damages, despite finding the school had fallen short. That's because courts in that part of the country required plaintiffs to show schools used "bad faith or gross misjudgment," a higher legal standard than most disability discrimination claims. The district, Osseo Area Schools, said that lowering the legal standard could expose the country's understaffed public schools to more lawsuits if their efforts fall short, even if officials are working in good faith. The family appealed to the Supreme Court, which found that lawsuits against schools should have the same requirements as other disability discrimination claims. Children with disabilities and their parents "face daunting challenges on a daily basis. We hold today that those challenges do not include having to satisfy a more stringent standard of proof than other plaintiffs," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. The court rebuffed the district's argument, made late in the appeals process, that all claims over accommodations for people with disabilities should be held to the same higher standard — a potentially major switch that would have been a "five-alarm fire" for the disability rights community, the girl's lawyers said. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wrote separately to say he would be willing to consider those arguments at some point in the future, though he didn't say whether they would win. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, saw it differently. Sotomayor wrote in another concurrence that adopting those higher standards more broadly would "eviscerate the core" of disability discrimination laws. The girl's attorney Roman Martinez, of Latham & Watkins, called Thursday's ruling a win for the family and "children with disabilities facing discrimination in schools across the country." He added that "it will help protect the reasonable accommodations needed to ensure equal opportunity for all."
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
One Supreme Court Justice Just Keeps Sliding Further to the Right
The Supreme Court delivered an important victory to disabled children on Thursday, unanimously affirming their right to reasonable accommodations in public education. Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion for the court reiterated that schools engage in unlawful discrimination when they deny these accommodations to kids, even if officials are not acting in bad faith. His ruling provides a lifeline to schoolchildren throughout the country who are wrongly denied equal access to learning opportunities because of a disability. Yet this victory comes with an asterisk: In a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas—joined, alarmingly, by Justice Brett Kavanaugh—launched an assault on civil rights law that would devastate disabled Americans' ability to receive an education and participate in all aspects of public life. Thomas and Kavanaugh suggested that the long-standing interpretation of disability law is, in fact, unconstitutional, arguing that states should have far more leeway to discriminate against those with disabilities. We should expect such callous radicalism from Thomas. But Kavanaugh's endorsement of this position is yet another ominous sign that the justice is drifting toward the hard-right flank of the court. It is difficult to know exactly what to make of Kavanaugh's drift to the right because he remains an intellectual lightweight who struggles to articulate and defend his views with any coherence. Is he just another MAGA-pilled jurist eager to promote Trump's agenda? Did his bruising confirmation battle leave him with a lifelong grudge against Democrats that he acts upon by trashing progressive priorities from the bench? Has he fallen under the influence of Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, who spurn centrism as craven capitulation to their perceived enemies on the left? Whatever the cause of his transformation, it is by now an undeniable fact that he has abandoned the middle of the court, sliding to the right of Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and sometimes even Justice Neil Gorsuch. Thursday's case, A. J. T. v. Osseo Area Schools, shows exactly why robust federal protections for disabled Americans remain so vital. The plaintiff, Ava Tharpe, 'suffers from a rare form of epilepsy that severely limits her physical and cognitive functioning,' as Roberts put it. Her seizures are worst in the morning, leaving her able to learn only after about 12 p.m. each day. When Tharpe transferred to a new school district in 2015, officials refused to provide her with special evening instruction, leaving her with far fewer hours of instruction than her peers. Eventually, Tharpe's parents sued under several laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, which broadly bar discrimination on the basis of disability. But the federal courts tossed out their suit. These courts acknowledged that Tharpe was denied equal access to education because of her disability. But they held that Tharpe was not entitled to an injunction or damages under the relevant statutes because she had not proven that school officials 'acted with bad faith or gross misjudgment.' Mere 'non-compliance' with the law, the courts concluded, was not enough to justify judicial intervention. This holding was, Roberts wrote, flatly wrong. The widespread adoption of this approach, however, has allowed rampant discrimination against disabled children to fester for decades, despite Congress' clear effort to stamp it out. 'In other disability discrimination contexts,' Roberts wrote, courts do not force plaintiffs to prove that state officials acted with malign intent. And there is no reason why this rule should apply to 'the educational services context' alone. 'In imposing a higher bar for discrimination claims based on educational services as compared to other sorts of disability discrimination claims,' the chief justice declared, the lower courts bungled 'the unambiguous directive' of the law. So Tharpe's suit can move forward. And now all disabled children denied accommodations by school officials will have an easier time establishing illegal discrimination and securing judicial relief. But Thomas and Kavanaugh were not content to let Roberts deliver a clean victory for civil rights law. Instead, Thomas chose to write a concurrence, joined by only Kavanaugh, that aimed an arrow at the heart of disability law. He argued that courts have been misinterpreting these statutes for decades, granting overly generous protections to disabled people. And he warned that this prevailing understanding of civil rights law may actually violate the Constitution in several different (and dubious) ways. Thomas' central gripe is that, as Roberts wrote on Thursday, federal courts do not typically need proof of intentional discrimination to rule in favor of disabled plaintiffs. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973—two closely related statutes that cover much the same ground—disability discrimination can occur even when government officials are not actively seeking to inflict harm. For instance, a school district might not intend to injure wheelchair users when it installs a stairway with no ramp. This refusal to consider the needs of mobility-impaired students has long been seen as discrimination nonetheless. Both the school district and a coalition of red states, however, argued that federal law does not clearly prohibit 'unintentional' discrimination against disabled people. In his concurrence, Thomas embraced that argument. And he wrote that Congress must use clearer language under the Constitution's spending clause if it wishes to outlaw such unintentional discrimination. This solution, though, turns out to be a mirage—because Thomas then declared that even if Congress clarified the statute, his view is that it would violate the Constitution in at least three different ways. First, he wrote that Congress has no general power to 'protect the learning environment in schools' under the commerce clause. Second, he wrote that Congress has no authority to mandate 'special accommodations for the disabled' under the 14th Amendment. Third, he wrote that Congress cannot compel states to provide such accommodations without violating the anti-commandeering doctrine rooted in the 10th Amendment. If the Supreme Court adopted these views, it would effectively eviscerate all disability rights law—not just public education requirements, but the entire framework prohibiting discrimination against disabled children and adults alike. Thomas did hedge by noting that he expressed 'no definitive views' on these theories. But he urged the lower courts to 'carefully consider whether the existing standards comport with the Constitution.' And caveats aside, the justice left no room for doubt that he believes all three of these constitutional objections to disability law have serious merit. It is hard to know where to start with this hodgepodge of grievances, because none of them are plausible under a fair reading of the law as it stands today. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissected Thomas' gripe about 'unintentional discrimination' in her own deft concurrence. Sotomayor explained that existing statutes apply whether or not officials show 'any invidious animus or purpose.' At bottom, these laws do not simply outlaw state bigotry toward disabled people; they also 'impose an affirmative obligation' to accommodate disabilities. Their expansive language clearly applies 'even where no ill will or animus toward people with disabilities is present.' So the Constitution's spending clause does not require Congress to speak any more clearly than it already has. Thomas' deeper constitutional objections are equally specious. The Supreme Court has consistently held that the commerce clause empowers Congress to address noneconomic conduct as part of a broader regulatory scheme. Disability laws are a key part of Congress' efforts to grant all children equal access to education, a universal public service on which the federal government spends billions each year. If these statutes exceed the commerce clause, then much (perhaps all) federal rules and regulations in this area must fall, too. But disability laws like the ADA do not even need a foundation in the commerce clause to survive constitutional assault, because they are—contrary to Thomas' claim—deeply rooted in the 14th Amendment, a standalone basis for their enactment. It is true that the Supreme Court has never held that the 14th Amendment, on its own, always requires states to accommodate disabled people. But SCOTUS has held that this amendment empowers Congress to go beyond what the Constitution requires in order to 'prevent and deter unconstitutional conduct.' The court has, in fact, expressly upheld some of the ADA's mandates under congressional authority to enforce the 14th Amendment. The court has also wielded the 14th Amendment to invalidate discriminatory policies in public education. It seems obvious that, under this precedent, Congress may rely upon the amendment to impose expansive nondiscrimination policies on state education systems. And when Congress acts pursuant to its enumerated powers, it cannot run afoul of the anti-commandeering doctrine. Of course, Thomas has long taken a hostile view of Congress' right to protect individual freedoms, particularly when it does so by limiting state authority. It is no surprise that the justice sounds eager to tear down the whole edifice of disability law. What is jarring, and portentous, is that Kavanaugh signed onto Thomas' opinion in full, further solidifying the justice's spot on the court's ultraconservative bloc. Earlier in his tenure, Kavanaugh often posed as a moderate, siding with the chief justice nearly 100 percent of the time. Over the past few years, though, he has shifted to the right, making bedfellows with Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito more and more often. Just in recent weeks, Kavanaugh has argued that the Second Amendment protects AR-15s, and—alone among the justices—argued for a ruinous assault on class actions. (The class-action case involved blind people denied an accommodation, a hint of the animosity toward disabled people he displayed in Thursday's case.) The list goes on. In March, when the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to pay out $2 billion in foreign aid, Kavanaugh joined Alito's bilious dissent, which smeared the lower court judge as a power-drunk hack. Last year, Kavanaugh sided with the hardcore conservatives in voting to let Texas nullify the Biden administration's authority over immigration enforcement. In other cases, the justice has staked out a far-right position, as when he suggested that a landmark federal law protecting Native children is, in fact, unconstitutional discrimination. And he pressed the court to consider striking down laws restricting 'conversion therapy' for LGBTQ+ minors before some of his conservative colleagues were ready to do so. 'You sowed the wind,' Kavanaugh warned Democratic senators during his confirmation battle, and now 'the country will reap the whirlwind.' That threat now reads less like a warning than a mission statement.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Supreme Court Unanimously Sides With Disabled Student in Lawsuit vs. District
In a unanimous opinion delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday sided with the family of Ava Tharpe, a teen with a rare form of epilepsy whose suburban Minneapolis district denied her request for a modified school day. The decision, A.J.T. vs. Osseo Area Schools, means K-12 students do not have to meet a higher standard of proof than others suing under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the justices had agreed with the district's longstanding argument, children with disabilities would have had to prove their school system intentionally acted in bad faith in denying them in-school accommodations. In 'friend of the court' briefs, numerous advocacy groups had warned that holding special education students to a different — and extraordinarily strict — definition of discrimination would have made it virtually impossible for families to assert their rights. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter The court agreed, saying everyone who files suit under the ADA should have to meet the same standard of 'deliberate indifference,' or disregard for an individual's need for accommodations. 'That our decision is narrow does not diminish its import for A.J.T. and 'a great many children with disabilities and their parents,' ' Roberts wrote, citing language from a lower court decision. 'Together they face daunting challenges on a daily basis. 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.' In a concurring opinion, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson elaborated, citing examples of discrimination that, intent notwithstanding, must still be addressed. 'Stairs may prevent a wheelchair-bound person from accessing a public space,' Sotomayor wrote. 'The lack of auxiliary aids may prevent a dead person from accessing medical treatment at a public hospital; and braille-free ballots may preclude a blind person from voting, all without animus on the part of the city planner, the hospital staff or the ballot designer.' Related 'Today's decision is a great win for Ava, and for children with disabilities facing discrimination in schools across the country,' said Roman Martinez, a lead attorney on the case. 'This outcome gets the law exactly right, and it will help protect the reasonable accommodations needed to ensure equal opportunity for all.' In a statement to The 74, a district spokesperson said the high court 'declined to decide what the particular intent standard is for such claims,' noting that 'the case will now return to the trial court for next steps consistent with the court's ruling.' In 2015, when Ava was in fourth grade, her family moved from Kentucky to Minnesota. Because her severe form of epilepsy causes frequent seizures during the morning, she had been allowed to attend school in the afternoon and early evening. Initially, the Osseo district agreed to a modified schedule, but reneged after the family moved, saying it was unwilling to provide services outside the normal school day. The state administrative law judge who heard the family's initial complaint called the district's arguments 'pretextual,' saying it was more concerned with 'the need to safeguard the ordinary end-of-the-workday departure times for its faculty and staff' than with outside evaluators' assessments of Ava's needs. As the case made its way to the Supreme Court, the district had consistently argued Ava had to prove the school system acted out of ill intent — a standard that would have applied only to K-12 students. But in the brief it submitted before oral arguments, Osseo widened its argument, saying that a showing of bad faith is required in all ADA cases, not just those involving schools. The April 28 hearing erupted in rare verbal fireworks when Justice Neil Gorsuch took exception to a statement by the district's attorney that lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice, who sided with the family, were 'lying' when they said the district had changed its argument. Justice Amy Coney Barrett characterized the district's shift as 'a pretty big sea change,' while Jackson questioned whether the district was saying the ADA does not necessarily require accommodations for people with disabilities. In their concurring opinion, Sotomayor and Jackson noted that when they wrote the act, lawmakers addressed the question at the heart of the case head-on: 'Congress was not naïve to the insidious nature of disability discrimination when it enacted the ADA and Rehabilitation Act. It understood full well that discrimination against those with disabilities derives principally from 'apathetic attitudes rather than affirmative animus.' ' The decision comes at a time when disability protections have come under fire from the second Trump administration and a number of Republican governors. In October, motivated by new rules that said gender dysphoria could be considered a disability, 17 states sued the federal government. Gender dysphoria is the clinical term for distress caused when a person's gender does not match their sex assigned at birth. That suit, Texas vs. Kennedy, originally sought to have Section 504, the portion of the ADA that outlaws in-school discrimination, declared unconstitutional. The states have since dropped that demand from the suit but are still asking courts to overturn rules prohibiting discrimination in a wide array of public settings. Whether the states will continue to press the new, broader case in the face of Thursday's decision remains to be seen. For their part, disability advocates were quick to celebrate. The district's position was 'flatly inconsistent with the law and would have stripped millions of people with disabilities of the protections Congress put in place to prevent systemic discrimination,' said Shira Wakschlag, senior executive officer of legal advocacy and general counsel for The Arc of the United States, which submitted a brief on the issues. 'The very foundation of disability civil rights was on the line.'
MTV Lebanon
12-06-2025
- Politics
- MTV Lebanon
12 Jun 2025 20:44 PM US Supreme Court bolsters school disability protections
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.
