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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.
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 deaf 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.”
“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.”
