Supreme Court overturns Gorsuch ruling against student with disabilities

[RandySF]

While U.S. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch answered questions about his judicial career during his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, the justices whose ranks he hopes to join unanimously struck down a prior decision of his against a student with autism.

All eight Supreme Court justices sided with a special-needs Colorado student Wednesday in the case Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District.

Endrew’s parents sued his public school for the cost of sending him to a private school, arguing that the public system did not provide an adequate education for their son and thus violated the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires that school districts provide a “free appropriate public education” to kids with disabilities.

Previously, the Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Endrew’s school district. The three circuit judges wrote that they were holding up precedent and pointed to the appeals court’s 2008 decision on Thompson R2-J School District v. Luke P. — which was written by Gorsuch.

In that case, the parents of Luke, another student with autism, also sued their son’s public school for allegedly violating IDEA, claiming they were forced to put their child in private school when he showed little progress in a public classroom.

But Gorsuch wrote that to comply with IDEA, public school programs need to allow students to make progress that “must merely be ‘more than de minimis,’” which is a Latin phrase meaning “too minor to merit consideration.” Basically, since Luke was making some progress in his public school, the district hadn’t broken IDEA, Gorsuch wrote — even though the boy made much more progress in the private option.


http://fox6now.com/2017/03/22/supreme-court-overturns-gorsuch-ruling-against-student-with-disabilities-tmwsp/

[Lucinda]

1. KNR Thank you!