The United States Supreme Court unanimously sided with a teenage girl in a disability discrimination case, making it easier for students who have disabilities to sue to enforce their rights under relevant laws.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a unanimous court, said that while the decision on Thursday might be narrow, it did not diminish its importance for the many children who have disabilities and are facing struggles daily.
Supreme Court Rules in Disability Discrimination Case
The development is centered around a teenage girl, Ava Tharpe, who suffers from serious disabilities caused by a rare form of epilepsy. She suffers from many seizures regularly, the majority of which happen in the morning hours.
This has forced the student's public school in Kentucky to arrange her schedule to only be in the afternoon and includes a teacher who teaches her at home in the early evening. However, when the teenager's family moved to Minnesota because of her father's work, her new school refused to provide accommodation for her disabilities, according to NPR.
This forced the teen to only get two-thirds of the instructional time in school compared to the total time that other students were receiving. The Osseo Area School system relented after years of litigation but the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Tharpes' claims for compensatory damages.
This essentially meant that they would not be reimbursed for various expenses, including experts, outside teachers, and lawyers that were needed to get equal treatment for their daughter.
The school district tried to defend its decision by saying that a higher standard, a stringent requirement that the institution had acted with "bad faith or gross misjudgment, should apply to the teenage girl's case, the New York Times reported.
Helping Americans With Disabilities
This particular argument did not go well among some disability rights groups, which argued that a ruling for the school may make it much more difficult for Americans with disabilities to bring court challenges.
But because of the Supreme Court's ruling, the teenage girl is now able to press her case in lower courts. Lawyers for the family wrote a petition to the court, arguing that the case presents an "exceptionally important issue for children with disabilities and their families."
Public school districts shared concerns about limited resources, arguing that the way to handle the case was not by lowering the standard for families like the Tharpes but by raising it for everyone else. However, the court dismissed that argument as arriving too late in the litigation, as per CNN.
