Near the end of this month, the U.S. Supreme Court (Court) will hear three K-12 cases back-to-back in the last two weeks of April. On April 22nd, the Court will hear Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case brought against Maryland’s Montgomery County Board of Education over the LGBTQ+ inclusive language arts curriculum that was adopted during the 2023-24 school year. The case will determine whether the school district had the right to rescind its parental opt-out policy because “individual schools could not accommodate the growing number of opt-out requests without causing significant disruptions to the classroom environment.” The plaintiffs are a group of Muslim, Christian and Jewish parents who appealed a May 2024 decision in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denying their request to put a hold on the school district’s opt-out policy as the case continued since it hindered the parents’ ability to raise their children in line with their religious beliefs. In essence, the parents are seeking only to excuse their own children from instruction on gender and identity issues they find controversial.
A friend-of-the-court brief by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) favored neither party, saying the Court “should be mindful that while many states and localities provide instruction on sex education, jurisdictions vary widely in their approaches to instruction about sex education, including topics related to sexual orientation” and “Petitioners oversimplify national trends when they suggest there is any sort of ‘national consensus respecting parental control over instruction on gender,'” and “Public schools around the country have long operated with the understanding, and expectation, that local and state authorities have the ability to regulate the conduct and curriculum within schools.”
A second case, A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, challenges an 8th Circuit ruling from March 2024 that said children with disabilities who claim disability discrimination in educational settings under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 must meet that high standard to potentially receive monetary damages. The Court must decide whether students filing such claims must prove that public school officials acted with discriminatory intent through “bad faith or gross misjudgment.” Petitioners aver that the 8th Circuit decision is “contrary to the text of IDEA, and undermines Section 504 and the ADA, to the significant detriment of children with disabilities.” A higher standard for proving disability discrimination would favor school districts in such cases, lessening their exposure for liability.
The third case, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, will be heard on April 30th and will be a precedent-setting “test case” to determine the future of what could be the nation’s first public religious charter school. As part of the case, Court could also rule more broadly on religious schools’ access to public funds. The 2024-25 scheduled opening of the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School was blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in June 2024 in a ruling that said the school’s creation violated the state and federal constitutions. The virtual school appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in October 2024.
For more details from K-12 Dive, click here.