Jacobs v. Salt Lake City School District
Filed: September 29, 2023
Court: Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals
Overview: Amicus brief explaining that children with disabilities must have access to education in their neighborhood schools.
Excerpt: “The ruling below is flatly inconsistent with the IDEA and case law interpreting its least restrictive environment (LRE) mandate. Congress has made clear through IDEA (in all its iterations over the past five decades) that one of its overriding priorities was giving students with disabilities access to the general education curriculum and education in the regular classroom to the maximum extent possible. Congress enacted IDEA, an “ambitious piece of legislation,” in response to the serious problem that a “majority of handicapped children in the United States were either totally excluded from schools or [were] sitting idly in regular classrooms awaiting the time when they were old enough to drop out.” Endrew F. v. Douglas Cnty. Sch. Dist. RE-1, 580 U.S. 386, 397 (2017) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted)… IDEA’s mandates are not empty aspirations: decades of scientifically based research demonstrates that children with disabilities achieve considerably more educational benefit from placement in general education classes with access to the general education curriculum through supplementary aids and services than from placement in special education classrooms or schools with limited access or no access to their age-appropriate non-disabled peers or general education curriculum.”
Case Documents
