On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Ava Tharpe, the plaintiff in A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, a notable education and disability rights case on the Court’s current docket. The ruling ensures that families will not have to meet the notoriously difficult standard of proving “bad faith and gross misjudgment” when suing schools for disability discrimination under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A.J.T. centers around Tharpe, a Minnesota teenager with epilepsy that is more severe in the morning. I covered the case for Mother Jones in February.
Tharpe and her family had requested that she receive more instructional hours later in the day, a proposal rejected by the school district. The family sued the district under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Section 504 and the ADA. Tharpe and her family won the case under the IDEA, but the Eighth Circuit court ruled in favor of the school district under Section 504 and the ADA, holding that the case did not meet the “bad faith and gross misjudgment” standard.
As I wrote previously:
In five of the 13 federal circuit courts, including the Eighth Circuit, which covers Minnesota, families suing schools under Section 504 and the ADA have to prove “bad faith or gross misjudgment,” a standard the Eighth Circuit said Ava’s case did not meet—despite acknowledging that the family “may have established a genuine dispute about whether the district was negligent or even deliberately indifferent”…
A ruling against Ava and her family could be a major setback for student disability rights enforcement and an equally major boon for the Trump administration’s plan to gut the Department of Education at the expense of disabled kids.
While diversity and equity protections are under attack by both the conservative Supreme Court majority and the Trump administration, A.J.T. illustrates the ways disability rights law is sometimes less politically polarized. Even the Trump administration, in an amicus brief, said there is “no sound basis for that idiosyncratic heightened standard” around only schools.
“We hold today that ADA and Rehabilitation Act claims based on educational services should be subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the unanimous decision. “Nothing in the text of Title II of the ADA or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act suggests that such claims should be subject to a distinct, more demanding analysis.”
Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates legal director Selene Almazan previously said that the bad-faith test runs counter to another item of federal legislation, the Handicapped Children’s Protection Act of 1986.
The case received some extra attention due to a “surprisingly aggressive” back-and-forth between Justice Neil Gorsuch and a lawyer representing the Osseo school district, Lisa Blatt, who accused Tharpe’s lawyers of “lying” about the district’s argument and whom Gorsuch admonished to be “careful with [her] words.” The district’s lawyers also argued that bad faith and gross misjudgment should be the standard for all ADA and Section 504 lawsuits—not just those pertaining to schools.
A ruling that in any way supported that argument would have made it much more difficult to enforce the ADA and Section 504—but the new ruling against the Minnesota district, by contrast, makes it easier.
“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 in the conclusion. “Together they face daunting challenges on a daily basis.”
