Last week, COPAA and 11 other advocacy groups filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, arguing that the Court should reverse the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in this case and end the imposition of a uniquely high and burdensome standard that schoolchildren must meet to prove disability discrimination. You can read the amicus brief here.

At the center of this case is the “bad faith or gross misjudgment” standard applied by several circuit courts of appeals to claims brought under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act by families of students with disabilities. This very high standard appears nowhere in the actual text of either the ADA or Section 504. However, since its decision in the 1982 case Monahan v. Nebraska, the Eighth Circuit has required families to prove that school districts acted with intent—specifically, bad faith or gross misjudgment—in discriminating against IDEA-eligible students. This very high standard does not apply to claims brought by plaintiffs alleging disability discrimination in any other context; it applies only to schoolchildren.

COPAA and its fellow amici establish in the amicus brief that “under the appropriate standard—the standard applicable to everyone outside the K-12 school setting,” countless schoolchildren alleging disability discrimination “would have been compensated for the harms caused by the discrimination that Section 504 and the ADA seek to remedy.”

Joining COPAA on the brief are The Arc of the United States, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, Children’s Law Center, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Education Law Center, Learning Rights Law Center, Minnesota Legal Aid, National Center for Youth Law, National Disability Rights Network, National Health Law Project, and the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

The amicus brief was written by Brian Wolfman (Counsel of Record) and Regina Wang of the Georgetown Law Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic and COPAA Legal Director Selene Almazan. COPAA member Amy J. Goetz, founder of the School Law Center in Minnesota, represents the family in this case, which will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court by Roman Martinez of Latham & Watkins, LLP.