The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with a teenage girl with epilepsy and her parents who had sued a Minnesota school district, claiming that her school had failed to provide reasonable accommodations, which made it difficult for her to receive instruction.
The case hinged on what standard of proof was required to show discrimination by public schools in education-related disability lawsuits.
In a unanimous decision written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the court held that the student and her family needed to show only that the school system had acted with “deliberate indifference” to her educational needs when they sued.
That is the same standard that applies when people sue other institutions for discrimination based on disability.
The school district argued that a higher standard — a stringent requirement that the institution had acted with “bad faith or gross misjudgment” — should apply. Had the district prevailed, the new standard might have applied broadly to all kinds disability rights claims filed under the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
That argument had unnerved some disability rights groups, which had cautioned that a ruling for the school could make it much harder for Americans with disabilities to successfully bring court challenges.
As a result of the ruling, the student will now be able to press her case in lower courts.
The case, A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, No. 24-249, stemmed from a dispute over whether the district, near Minneapolis, had provided reasonable accommodations for Ava Tharpe, whose severe epilepsy made it hard for her to come to school and participate during regular hours.
After Ava’s family moved to Minnesota from Kentucky, her parents requested that she be able to receive instruction in the evening because of her disability, as she had in Kentucky. The family said in court filings that the school district notified them that it would not be able to accommodate the request, which meant that Ava received only 65 percent of the instruction time of her peers.
A federal judge had sided, in part, with the school district. The judge concluded that under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act — federal legislation that requires public entities and organizations that receive federal funding to provide reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities — the Tharpe family was required to show that the school district had acted with either “bad faith” or “gross misjudgment.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld that ruling, and the Tharpe family appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the courts had applied the wrong standard. They pointed to several other appeals courts that had applied a lower standard of proof in such cases, requiring only that the school had showed “deliberate indifference” to her needs.
In their petition to the court, lawyers for the family argued that the case presented “an exceptionally important issue for children with disabilities and their families” and that educational discrimination “often has life-altering consequences for children with disabilities.”
The lawyers said that the case raised “one core question”: whether children with disabilities who brought education-related discrimination cases were required to meet a more stringent test than others who sue under federal disability laws.
“It is inconceivable that when Congress enacted laws to combat disability discrimination, it silently singled out school-age children — perhaps the most vulnerable subset of people with disabilities — for disfavored treatment,” lawyers for the family argued in a brief.
The school district urged the justices not to take the case, arguing that the system had “reasonably responded to the disagreement” about the length of Ava’s school day “by making persistent efforts” to address the situation.
The district added that although Ava’s parents “disagree with some decisions the district made,” the family’s frustrations did “not evince discriminatory intent under any standard used in any circuit.”
In a brief to the justices, the school district also raised concerns about the broader implications of a ruling in favor of the family, raising fears that it could usher in a flood of similar claims, subjecting “every public school in America” to “federal-court supervision, plus the potential loss of federal funding and money damages.”
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
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