Another Way Forward
In my last post, I talked about how some laws have a claim exhaustion requirement. Claim exhaustion refers to the idea that a suing party must try all of the available remedies for one law before they sue under another law. In the IDEA’s case, that means parents have to take their case all the way to an independent hearing. That hearing’s outcome could put an end to the litigation — before other laws like the ADA could be invoked.
The family in Fry v. Napoleon Community School didn’t want to be forced into an independent hearing that might preclude them from seeking compensatory damages and lost wages under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
To put their argument bluntly, independent hearings are intended to address a very specific problem — so why let them serve as a bottleneck for legitimate claims of lost wages and compensatory damages?
Fortunately, an awkwardly worded provision of the IDEA might help bypass independent hearings. The IDEA says that nothing in its text may be construed to limit the legal remedies available to plaintiffs under the ADA or other federal laws. It does add a caveat, saying that, if the remedy is available under the IDEA, then those administrative processes must be exhausted under the IDEA.
These cases are important because any implication that a school can be held responsible for not doing its job has traditionally failed in court. Courts have, again and again, refused to hold that schools can be sued for malpractice — even if a failing student is cynically given an unwarranted diploma. The reason that the courts refuse to do this is obvious: If a court holds a failing school district liable for every child that it fails to educate, then our most vulnerable schools will deteriorate even further as they are bled dry from judgments. Gottlieb & Wang is confident that there are ways to circumvent “conventional wisdom” without harming schools — and achieve justice for long-underserved families.
For more information, contact us.
Marc Gottlieb
Partner
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14th Floor
Brooklyn Heights, NY, 11201
Marc@GottliebFirm.com
(646) 820-8506