The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to consider whether a state can punish children, specifically children who need special education services, if their parents exercise their own constitutional rights.
According to the Institute for Justice, the dispute involves two Massachusetts families.
Regulations there force “parents to choose between sending their children to schools they have a constitutional right to select and receiving special education services that state law guarantees them.”
Ariella and David Hellman, and Josh Harrison and Miriam Segura-Harrison—parents of children with special needs—are fighting alongside the IJ to change that.
“Massachusetts law entitles every child with special needs to services on equal terms—not just the ones enrolled in schools the state prefers,” said IJ lawyer David Hodges. “The state made that guarantee. It’s time to honor it.”
Massachusetts law guarantees special education services to all children with special needs, regardless of whether they attend public or private school, the IJ confirmed.
“What that means is disabled children must be educated alongside nondisabled children to the maximum extent appropriate, and they may only be removed from their regular educational environment when their disability demands it,” the legal team said.
But, they confirmed, the state has made access to needed services “practically unobtainable for children whose parents have exercised their constitutional right to send them to private school.”
State officials have created rules that bar those children, and only those children, “from receiving services in their classes, their schools, and even on their school’s premises. And the only reason why they are subject to this condition is because their parents have exercised their fundamental, constitutional right to enroll them in a private school.”
That, the case charges, is an illegal condition under Supreme Court precedent, which is that parents have a fundamental constitutional right to direct the education and upbringing of their children, which includes the right to send their children to a private school.
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had claimed, in its ruling, that the parents’ rights in this case do not get the “same level of protection as other constitutional rights.”
Burdens and penalties on parents exercising their rights is fine, the ruling said.
IJ is charging that the government may not condition the availability of public benefits on the surrender of other constitutional rights, so too may it not force parents to forgo their right to select private education for their children in order to obtain special education benefits to which their children are statutorily entitled.
“Children who need help deserve it, no matter where they learn,” said IJ lawyer Renee Flaherty. “To essentially take away these services simply because their parents exercised a fundamental, constitutional right is both harmful and unconstitutional.”
