Students’ Rights and Responsibilities
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such students must be retained in their current placement pending the completion of lengthy official hearings. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1990 specified additional rights that make it difficult to suspend or expel students with disabilities, including those who may be severely disruptive or prone to violence. As a result, educators are seeking new ways to guarantee the rights of students while dealing with disruptive pupils who are classified as disabled. Congress has passed legislation aimed at making it less cumbersome for administrators to suspend disabled students who violate school discipline rules, but educators report that practical issues are still murky. In addition, research indicates that low-income, disabled black students are suspended more frequently than low-income disabled white students, thus raising the possibility of legal challenges involving civil rights guarantees.39
Restraining and Secluding Disabled Students About three-quarters of students physically restrained in school and about 60 percent of those placed in seclusion or some other form of involuntary confinement are students with disabilities. Many of these students are emotionally disturbed children and youth who sometimes pose serious dangers to themselves and others. Although restraining or secluding disabled students frequently is wholly or partly intended to keep schools safe in the face of difficulties described previously regarding suspension, sometimes the main motive is punishment that can cause serious injury. In any case, schools that rely heavily on restraint and seclusion may be violating IDEA guarantees of “free appropriate education,” and if their disabled students are mostly minority students, they may be violating civil rights laws. Thus, it is not surprising that many schools seek to implement alternative approaches to student control.40
9-3e Protection from Violence Educators have a duty to protect students against violent actions that occur at school or at school-sponsored events, which frequently extends to off-campus events such as graduations, proms, and parties. Depending on the circumstances, the courts or other government agencies may find school districts or their employees legally liable for failing in this duty. For example, a Louisiana court held a school district partly responsible for the gunshot wound suffered by a student after a school security guard warned the student of trouble but refused to escort him to his car. Virginia Tech University was fined $55,000 by the US Department of Education for its slow response in moving to protect students under gunfire from a mentally ill attacker. By contrast, an Illinois appellate court held Chicago high school officials not liable for the shooting of a student because they did not know that the weapon had been brought into school. In general, if the chance of harm to students is highly foreseeable, the educator’s “duty to care” becomes a “duty to protect.” Of course, regardless of questions involving legal culpability, educators should do everything possible to protect their students from violence.41
Mitchell L. Yell, “Honig v. Doe,” Exceptional Children (September 1989), pp. 60–69; Richard S. Vacca, “Student Procedural Due Process 2006,” CEPI Education Law Newsletter (February 2006), available at www.cepi.vcu.edu/publications/newsletters; and Judith Saltzman, “Disciplinary Protections for Children with Disabilities,” 2014 posting by Milestones Autism Resources, available at www.milestones.org. 40 Michelle Diament, “Harsh Discipline More Common For Students With Disabilities,” March 21, 2014, posting by Disability Scoop, available at www.disabilityscoop.com; and Angela Pascopella, “District Changes Restraint and Seclusion Policy,” District Administration (September 2014), available at www.districtadministration.com. 41 Perry A. Zirkel, “Safe Promises?” Phi Delta Kappan (April 2000), pp. 635–636; Richard S. Vacca, “The Duty to Protect Students from Harm,” CEPI Education Law Newsletter (November 2002), available at www.cepi.vcu.edu/publications/newsletter; and Kelly Schwartz, “Avoiding Sorrow in Morrow,” Boston College Law Review, Supp. 127 (2014), available at www .bclawreview.org. 39
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