Education

Excerpts From the High Court’s Decision in Honig v. Doe

January 27, 1987 8 min read
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“Conspicuously absent from [the stay-putprovision] is any emergency exception fordangerous students. ... [W]e can onlyconclude that the omission was intentional;we are therefore not at liberty to engraft ontothe statute an exception Congress chose notto create."--Justice William J. Brennan

The following are excerpts from the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Honig v. Doe. Footnotes and legal citations are omitted.

Justice Brennan delivered the opinion of the Court.

As a condition of federal financial assistance, the Education of the Handicapped Act requires states to ensure a “free appropriate public education” for all disabled children within their jurisdictions. In aid of this goal, the Act establishes a comprehensive system of procedural safeguards designed to ensure parental participation in decisions concerning the education of their disabled children and to provide administrative and judicial review of any decisions with which those parents disagree. Among these safeguards is the so-called “stay-put” provision, which directs that a disabled child “shall remain in [his or her] then current educational placement” pending completion of any review proceedings, unless the parents and state or local educational agencies otherwise agree. 20 U.S.C. 1415(e)(3). Today we must decide whether, in the face of this statutory proscription, state or local authorities may nevertheless unilaterally exclude disabled children from the classroom for dangerous or disruptive conduct growing out of their disabilities. In addition, we are called upon to decide whether a district court may, in the exercise of its equitable powers, order a state to provide educational services directly to a disabled child when the local agency fails to do so. ...

III

The language of 1415(e)(3) is unequivocal. It states plainly that during the dependency of any proceedings initiated under the Act, unless the state or local educational agency and the parents or guardian of a disabled child otherwise agree, “the child shall remain in the then current educational placement.” Faced with this clear directive, petitioner asks us to read a “dangerousness” exception into the stay-put provision on the basis of either of two essentially inconsistent assumptions: first, that Congress thought the residual authority of school officials to exclude dangerous students from the classroom too obvious for comment; or second, that Congress inadvertently failed to provide such authority and this Court must therefore remedy the oversight. Because we cannot accept either premise, we decline petitioner’s invitation to rewrite the statute.

Petitioner’s arguments proceed, he suggests, from a simple, common-sense proposition: Congress could not have intended the stay-put provision to be read literally, for such a construction leads to the clearly unintended, and untenable, result that school districts must return violent or dangerous students to school while the often lengthy eha proceedings run their course. We think it clear, however, that Congress very much meant to strip schools of the unilateral authority they had traditionally employed to exclude disabled students, particularly emotionally disturbed students, from school. In so doing, Congress did not leave school administrators powerless to deal with dangerous students; it did, however, deny school officials their former right to “self-help,” and directed that in the future the removal of disabled students could be accomplished only with the permission of the parents or, as a last resort, the courts.

As noted above, Congress passed the eha after finding that school systems across the country had excluded one out of every eight disabled children from classes. In drafting the law, Congress was largely guided by the recent decisions in Mills v. Board of Education of District of Columbia (1972), and Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children v. Pennsylvania (1972) (parc), both of which involved the exclusion of hard-to-handle disabled students. Mills in particular demonstrated the extent to which schools used disciplinary measures to bar children from the classroom. There, school officials had labeled four of the seven minor plaintiffs “behavioral problems,” and had excluded them from classes without providing any alternative education to them or any notice to their parents. After finding that this practice was not limited to the named plaintiffs but affected in one way or another an estimated class of 12,000 to 18,000 disabled students, the district court enjoined future exclusions, suspensions, or expulsions “on grounds of discipline.”

Congress attacked such exclusionary practices in a variety of ways. It required participating states to educate all disabled children, regardless of the severity of their disabilities, and included within the definition of “handicapped” those children with serious mental disturbances. It further provided for meaningful parental participation in all aspects of a child’s educational placement, and barred schools, through the stay-put provision, from changing that placement over the parent’s objection until all review proceedings were completed. Recognizing that those proceedings might prove long and tedious, the Act’s drafters did not intend 1415(e)(3) to operate inflexibly, and they therefore allowed for interim placements where parents and school officials are able to agree on one. Conspicuously absent from 1415(e)(3), however, is any emergency exception for dangerous students. This absence is all the more telling in light of the injunctive decree issued in parc, which permitted school officials unilaterally to remove students in ‘“extraordinary circumstances.”’ Given the lack of any similar exception in Mills, and the close attention Congress devoted to these “landmark” decisions, we can only conclude that the omission was intentional; we are therefore not at liberty to engraft onto the statute an exception Congress chose not to create.

Our conclusion that 1415(e)(3) means what it says does not leave educators hamstrung. The Education Department has observed that, "[w]hile the [child’s] placement may not be changed [during any complaint proceeding], this does not preclude the agency from using its normal procedures for dealing with children who are endangering themselves or others.” Such procedures may include the use of study carrels, time-outs, detention, or the restriction of privileges. More drastically, where a student poses an immediate threat to the safety of others, officials may temporarily suspend him or her for up to 10 school days. This authority, which respondent in no way disputes, not only ensures that school administrators can protect the safety of others by promptly removing the most dangerous of students, it also provides a “cooling down” period during which officials can initiate iep review and seek to persuade the child’s parents to agree on an interim placement. And in those cases in which the parents of a truly dangerous child adamantly refuse to permit any change in placement, the 10-day respite gives school officials an opportunity to invoke the aid of the courts under 1415(e)(2), which empowers courts to grant any appropriate relief.

Petitioner contends, however, that the availability of judicial relief is more illusory than real, because a party seeking review under 1415(e)(2) must exhaust time-consuming administrative remedies, and because under the court of appeals’ construction of 1415(e)(3), courts are as bound by the stay-put provision’s “automatic injunction,” as are schools. It is true that judicial review is normally not available under 1415(e)(2) until all administrative proceedings are completed, but as we have previously noted, parents may by-pass the administrative process where exhaustion would be futile or inadequate. While many of the eha’s procedural safeguards protect the rights of parents and children, schools can and do seek redress through the administrative review process, and we have no reason to believe that Congress meant to require schools alone to exhaust in all cases, no matter how exigent the circumstances. The burden in such cases, of course, rests with the school to demonstrate the futility or inadequacy of administrative review, but nothing in 1415(e)(2) suggests that schools are completely barred from attempting to make such a showing. Nor do we think that 1415(e)(3) operates to limit the equitable powers of district courts such that they cannot, in appropriate cases, temporarily enjoin a dangerous disabled child from attending school. As the eha’s legislative history makes clear, one of the evils Congress sought to remedy was the unilateral exclusion of disabled children by schools, not courts, and one of the purposes of 1415(e)(3), therefore, was “to prevent school officials from removing a child from the regular public-school classroom over the parents’ objection pending completion of the review proceedings.” The stay-put provision in no way purports to limit or pre-empt the authority conferred on courts by 1415(e)(2), indeed, it says nothing whatever about judicial power.

In short then, we believe that school officials are entitled to seek injuctive relief under 1415(e)(2) in appropriate cases. In any such action, 1415(e)(3) effectively creates a presumption in favor of the child’s current educational placement which school officials can overcome only by showing that maintaining the child in his or her current placement is substantially likely to result in injury either to himself or herself, or to others. In the present case, we are satisfied that the district court, in enjoining the state and local defendants from indefinitely suspending respondent or otherwise unilaterally altering his then current placement, properly balanced respondent’s interest in receiving a free appropriate public education in accordance with the procedures and requirements of the eha against the interests of the state and local school officials in maintaining a safe learning environment for all their students.

IV

We believe the courts below properly construed and applied 1415(e)(3), except insofar as the court of appeals held that a suspension in excess of 10 school days does not constitute a “change in placement.” We therefore affirm the court of appeals’ judgment on this issue as modified herein. Because we are equally divided on the question whether a court may order a state to provide services directly to a disabled child where the local agency has failed to do so, we affirm the court of appeals’ judgment on this issue as well.

Affirmed

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