A. J. T. v. Osseo Area Schools, Independent School Dist. No. 279

605 U.S. 335
CourtSupreme Court of the United States
DecidedJune 12, 2025
Docket24-249
StatusPublished

This text of 605 U.S. 335 (A. J. T. v. Osseo Area Schools, Independent School Dist. No. 279) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of the United States primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
A. J. T. v. Osseo Area Schools, Independent School Dist. No. 279, 605 U.S. 335 (2025).

Opinion

PRELIMINARY PRINT

Volume 605 U. S. Part 2 Pages 335–359

OFFICIAL REPORTS OF

THE SUPREME COURT June 12, 2025

REBECCA A. WOMELDORF reporter of decisions

NOTICE: This preliminary print is subject to formal revision before the bound volume is published. Users are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. C. 20543, pio@supremecourt.gov, of any typographical or other formal errors. OCTOBER TERM, 2024 335

Syllabus

A. J. T., by and through her parents, A. T., et al. v. OSSEO AREA SCHOOLS, INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 279, et al. certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the eighth circuit No. 24–249. Argued April 28, 2025—Decided June 12, 2025 Multiple federal laws afford protections for children with disabilities in public schools. Three statutory schemes are particularly relevant to this case. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 provides that no qualifed individual with a disability shall be excluded from participa- tion in, denied the benefts of, or subjected to discrimination under any federally funded program solely by reason of her or his disability. Simi- larly, Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits qualifed individuals with disabilities from being excluded from or de- nied the benefts of a public entity's services, programs, or activities by reason of disability. While the antidiscrimination guarantees of Section 504 and Title II apply in a variety of contexts, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) offers federal funds to States in ex- change for the commitment to furnish the core guarantee of a “free appropriate public education” to children in public schools with certain physical or intellectual disabilities. The centerpiece of the IDEA is the provision of an “individualized educational program,” (IEP) which “spells out” a plan to meet all of the educational needs of a child with a qualifying disability. Fry v. Napoleon Community Schools, 580 U. S. 154, 158. Petitioner A. J. T. is a teenage girl with a rare form of epilepsy that severely limits her physical and cognitive functioning. She suffers from seizures that are so frequent in the mornings that she cannot attend school before noon, though she is alert and able to learn from noon until 6 p.m. For the frst few years of her schooling, school offcials accommo- dated A. J. T.'s condition by permitting her to avoid morning activities and instead receive evening instruction. But when A. J. T.'s family moved to Minnesota in 2015, her new school district—Osseo Area Public Schools, Independent District No. 279—denied her parents' repeated requests to include evening instruction in A. J. T.'s IEP. Between 2015 and 2018, A. J. T. received only 4.25 hours of instruction daily compared to the typical 6.5-hour school day for nondisabled students in the dis- trict. After even further cuts to A. J. T.'s school day were proposed, her parents fled an IDEA complaint with the Minnesota Department 336 A. J. T. v. OSSEO AREA SCHOOLS, INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DIST. NO. 279 Syllabus

of Education, alleging that the school's refusal to provide afterhours instruction denied A. J. T. a free appropriate public education. An Ad- ministrative Law Judge determined that the school district had vio- lated the IDEA and ordered the school to provide compensatory educa- tion and evening instruction. Federal courts subsequently affrmed A. J. T.'s IDEA victory. A. J. T. and her parents then sued under the ADA and the Rehabilita- tion Act, requesting a permanent injunction, reimbursement for certain costs, and compensatory damages. The District Court granted sum- mary judgment for the school, and the Eighth Circuit affrmed. In so holding, the Eighth Circuit stated that a school district's failure to pro- vide a reasonable accommodation was not enough to state a prima facie case of discrimination under Monahan v. Nebraska, 687 F. 2d 1164, which requires a plaintiff to prove conduct by school offcials rising to the level of bad faith or gross misjudgment. Held: Schoolchildren bringing ADA and Rehabilitation Act claims related to their education are not required to make a heightened showing of “bad faith or gross misjudgment” but instead are subject to the same standards that apply in other disability discrimination contexts. Pp. 344–351. (a) Outside the educational services context, courts of appeals permit plaintiffs to establish violations and obtain injunctive relief under the ADA and Rehabilitation Act without proving intent to discriminate. To obtain compensatory damages, courts generally require a showing of intentional discrimination, which most circuits fnd satisfed by “deliber- ate indifference”—a standard requiring only a showing that the defend- ant disregarded a strong likelihood that the challenged action would violate federally protected rights. Nothing in the text of the applicable substantive protections or remedial provisions of Title II of the ADA or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act suggests that claims based on educational services should be subject to a distinct, more demanding analysis. Pp. 344–345. (b) Some courts, however, have come to apply a heightened intent standard to ADA and Rehabilitation Act claims in the educational serv- ices context. This standard traces back to the “bad faith or gross mis- judgment” rule articulated by the Eighth Circuit in its 1982 decision in Monahan, in which the Eighth Circuit reasoned that to prove discrimi- nation under the Rehabilitation Act in the educational context, a plain- tiff must show “something more than a mere failure to provide” a free appropriate public education. 687 F. 2d, at 1170. The court explained a heightened showing of bad faith or gross misjudgment was necessary Cite as: 605 U. S. 335 (2025) 337

to “harmonize” the Rehabilitation Act and the IDEA and to refect the proper balance between disabled children's rights, state offcials' respon- sibilities, and courts' competence in technical felds. Id., at 1171. In Smith v. Robinson, 468 U. S. 992, this Court similarly tried to “har- monize” the IDEA's specifc guarantee of a free appropriate public edu- cation with the protections of other antidiscrimination laws, ultimately concluding that the IDEA's comprehensive statutory scheme was the exclusive avenue by which a disabled child or his parents could chal- lenge the adequacy of his education. Within two years, however, Con- gress enacted a new provision of the IDEA overturning Smith. That provision, now codifed at 20 U. S. C. § 1415(l), provides that nothing in the IDEA “shall be construed to restrict or limit the rights, procedures, and remedies available under” the ADA, Rehabilitation Act, or other federal laws protecting disabled children's rights. This provision makes clear that the IDEA does not restrict or limit rights or remedies that other federal antidiscrimination statutes independently confer on children with disabilities. The bad faith or gross misjudgment rule de- rived from Monahan is irreconcilable with the unambiguous directive of § 1415(l). In imposing a higher bar for discrimination claims based on educational services as compared to other sorts of disability discrimi- nation claims, the Eighth Circuit effectively read the IDEA to implicitly limit the ability of disabled schoolchildren to vindicate their independent ADA and Rehabilitation Act rights, thereby making it more diffcult to secure the statutory remedies provided by Congress. Pp. 345–349. (c) The school district no longer defends Monahan's asymmetric rule, and contends instead that bad faith or gross misjudgment is the correct standard of intent for all ADA and Rehabilitation Act claims, whether in or out of schools.

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Related

§ 1415
20 U.S.C. § 1415
§ 794
29 U.S.C. § 794
§ 12131
42 U.S.C. § 12131
§ 12132
42 U.S.C. § 12132
§ 794a
29 U.S.C. § 794a
§ 12133
42 U.S.C. § 12133
§ 1400
20 U.S.C. § 1400
§ 12101
42 U.S.C. § 12101

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