Following an expedited due process hearing in November, a hearing officer ordered that Shamokin Area School District must allow a fifth-grade student with mental health disabilities to return to school after her unlawful indefinite exclusion.

To address our country’s longstanding discriminatory exclusion of students with disabilities from schools, including a law in Pennsylvania that relieved schools of an obligation to enroll students deemed “uneducable” or “untrainable,” Congress nearly 50 years ago included several important protections in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to strip schools of their unilateral authority to remove students with disabilities. Unfortunately, ELC still encounters egregious situations where these protections are flouted in violation of students’ rights.

When Shamokin indefinitely barred our eleven-year-old client from returning to school based on a discipline incident and forced her to remain on an asynchronous cyber platform at home without any due process, the hearing officer found “it adhered to no IDEA-compliant process of procedure to support this unilateral decision denying her a legally required education. After preventing her from returning for nearly two months, Shamokin must now allow her back to school and must conduct a functional behavior assessment to identify and address her behavioral needs within the school.