Julia Metraux at Mother Jones:
Minnesota teenager Ava T. lives with seizures that predominate in the morning, preventing her from attending school safely before noon. When her suburban Minneapolis school district refused to update her individualized education plan—a disability accommodation guaranteed by federal law—to allow at-home evening instruction to compensate, Ava and her parents sued in 2021.
A district court sided with Ava and her family—her last name is withheld—ruling in 2022 that the school district had violated her rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. But separate complaints say that the district had breached Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, which include extensive disability rights provisions. 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.”
The Supreme Court agreed to hear Ava’s case, A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, in January. Its ruling will decide whether that tougher standard—bad faith is notoriously hard to prove—applies nationwide under Section 504 and the ADA when suing schools. 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
