Board of Educ. of Ottawa Twp. High Sch. Dist. 140 v. U.S. Dept. of Educ., No. 07-2008 (7th Cir. Feb. 11, 2008)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (IL, IN, WI) has affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education and the Illinois State Board of Education that alleged that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are legally incompatible. Two Illinois school boards and several special education students and their parents sought a declaratory judgment invalidating NCLB requirements for systemic remediation activities that necessitate modifying students' individualized education programs (IEPs) without any regard to the students’ individual needs. The district court held that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing.
The Seventh Circuit affirmed, but on different grounds. The appeals court rejected the lower court’s reasoning that “the plaintiffs lacked standing because both statutes establish voluntary programs, and the school districts can solve any problem for themselves by turning down the federal money and escaping the obligations.” This reasoning was flawed, the Seventh Circuit found, because (1) the decision to participate in these programs is made at the state rather than the local level; (2) the plaintiffs included parents, who lack any option about participation; and (3) both statutes require jurisdictions to opt in or out for a year or more at a time. The appeals court also rejected the district court’s finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing because the school districts had yet to suffer a concrete injury. This narrow perception of the “plaintiffs’ injury as conjectural or contingent comes from thinking about how the districts may fare in meeting educational targets (or individual educational programs) as the only harm,” the appeals court found. Compliance with NCLB is expensive, the court noted, acknowledging the Sixth Circuit’s (KY, MI, OH, TN) recent ruling in Pontiac Sch. Dist. v. Spellings that school districts had standing because complying with NCLB may cost more than a district receives in federal grants. “Any identifiable injury will do” for purposes of standing, and the school districts had a “direct stake in the outcome” because “[t]hey must pay for more tests than they would administer if left to their own devices, and this injury can be redressed by a declaratory judgment excusing the school districts from complying with the portions of the statute that they deem objectionable.”
Although they had standing, the Seventh Circuit went on to conclude that “the plaintiffs’ claim is too weak to justify continued litigation.” Even if their assertion that NCLB and IDEA are irreconcilable in some respects is correct, the court determined, their argument that the earlier law, IDEA, can overrule the latter one, NCLB, “has time traveling in the wrong direction.” While conceding that it could not rule out the possibility that there might be some state or federal regulations that purport to rely on NCLB but that are not authorized under the act and are, therefore, barred by IDEA, the court emphasized that this lawsuit targeted NCLB as a whole. A federal court cannot forbid application of legislation enacted in 2001 just because it may undermine legislation enacted between 1970 and 1990. As a result, the court modified the judgment of the district court to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim on which relief may be granted.
Board of Educ. of Ottawa Twp. High Sch. Dist. 140 v. U.S. Dept. of Educ., No. 07-2008 (7th Cir. Feb. 11, 2008)
[Editor’s Note: The lower court’s decision is summarized at the first link below. The federal government is asking the Sixth Circuit to reconsider its ruling in Pontiac Sch. Dist. v. Spellings. See the second link.]
NSBA School Law pages on U.S. district court decision
NSBA School Law pages on Pontiac Sch. Dist. v. Spellings rehearing