WASHINGTON ― The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in the case of a deaf student who was left without a qualified sign-language interpreter for 12 years while enrolled at Sturgis Public Schools in southwest Michigan.
A decision in the case by the high court could help clarify the legal redress available for claims brought against school districts on behalf of children with disabilities.
The case centers on Miguel Luna Perez, now 27, who attended Sturgis schools from 2004 through 2016 and was assigned a teaching aide who had no interpreter training, knew no sign language and whose only qualification was attempting to teach herself a form of signed English from a book, his lawyers alleged.
Instead, Luna Perez and the aide communicated through an “novel” method of invented signs that the school led him and his family to believe was a formal sign language; however, Luna Perez never learned American Sign Language or any other mode of signing at Sturgis, and he effectively couldn’t communicate with teachers or peers to learn from his classes, according to court records.His parents had been assured he was progressing in school, but in 2016, at age 20, Luna Perez tested at a first- to third-grade level in reading and writing. Court records say a psychologist who evaluated Luna Perez that year surmised that the years he was deprived of language could have a long-term impact on his cognitive, social and academic skills, as well as job prospects.
“The tragedy of this whole case is that the kind of deprivation that Miguel suffered while in the Sturgis school system has really hurt him in a way that's going to be felt throughout his lifetime,” said attorney Roman Martinez, who will be arguing on behalf of Luna Perez on Wednesday.
Case background
Luna Perez in 2017 filed claims in a state administrative proceeding under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Americans with Disabilities Act and related Michigan laws, but the IDEA hearing officer dismissed the ADA claim on the grounds that he lacked the authority to hear it.
The next year, the school district and Luna Perez’s parents settled the IDEA claim, including an agreement by Sturgis to pay for his attendance at the Michigan School for the Deaf in Flint — to which he had enrolled in fall 2016. The settlement also covered sign-language instruction for him and his family, and the family’s attorneys’ fees.
Later in 2018, Luna Perez filed a lawsuit against Sturgis schools in federal court under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which unlike IDEA allows for compensatory damages for harms such as lost income. He alleged that the school discriminated against him by not providing resources for him to fully participate in his classes.
A federal judge in west Michigan dismissed the claim, reasoning that Luna Perez had not “exhausted” or fully pursued it through the state administrative proceedings process.
A divided three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in June 2021, with the majority concluding that the decision to settle the IDEA claim barred Luna Perez from bringing a similar lawsuit against the district, “even under a different federal law” because of the IDEA’s “exhaustion” requirement.
The majority of appellate judges said Luna Perez hadn’t exhausted the IDEA administrative process because the hearing officer didn’t rule on whether he had gotten a "free appropriate public education." Luna Perez's attorneys had argued that exhaustion would have been futile because he'd gotten all the relief available in the IDEA proceedings through his settlement.
The majority judges recognized that Perez had settled his claim but said that “when an available administrative process could have provided relief, it is not futile, even if the plaintiff decides not to take advantage of it.”
Judge Amul Thapar, an appointee of Republican former President George W. Bush writing for the majority, reasoned that “if a request for damages could excuse the failure to exhaust, then any student seeking money damages could skip the administrative process.”
The 6th Circuit’s opinion created a split with other courts of appeals that hear IDEA claims and have recognized exceptions such as futility in such cases.
Deaf student’s argument
Luna Perez, backed by U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and advocates for people with disabilities, is asking the justices to reverse the 6th Circuit and clarify that accepting an IDEA settlement doesn’t preclude students from seeking different forms of relief under separate statutes.
“The 6th Circuit’s holding forces parents to make a choice and face a trade-off between pursuing their rights under the IDEA statute — which is the one that's designed to provide educational relief as quickly as possible — and preserving their rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act,” said Martinez, the attorney for Luna Perez.
“That's a really tough choice. And it's either going to disincentivize settlements, which means that kids are not going to be getting the immediate educational relief that they're entitled to under the IDEA. Or it's going to essentially result in kids and their parents abandoning or forfeiting their rights under other statutes. And neither of those results is consistent with what Congress had in mind.”
Martinez argued that the IDEA’s exhaustion requirement shouldn’t apply when a plaintiff is seeking relief under a different statute, such as ADA, and the requested remedy isn’t available under IDEA. Instead, plaintiffs should be able to just go to court.
Separately, he argued that, in cases involving a settlement with the school district to resolve an IDEA dispute, that settlement should mean that the plaintiff has “exhausted” the administrative process detailed in the statute.
“This statutory scheme set up by the IDEA, on its face, recognizes that a settlement is an appropriate conclusion of the IDEA administrative process,” Martinez said.
School district’s argument
Sturgis Public Schools is urging the justices to affirm the 6th Circuit, arguing that in amending the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Congress didn’t include an exception to the exhaustion requirement.
Attorney Shay Dvoretzky, who is expected to argue on behalf of the Sturgis school district, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In his brief, Dvoretzky said the text of the IDEA statute supports the district’s position that the exhaustion requirement centers on the right to an education that the plaintiff is seeking to enforce and not the remedy that the plaintiff prefers.
He also cites practical reasons why plaintiffs may not "bypass" the IDEA administrative procedures — that education agencies, not judges, are the experts on special education, and the process prioritizes the “best interests of the child over non-urgent suits” for damages, all while developing a detailed administrative record for judicial review.
Dvoretzky said the risk of Luna Perez’s argument is it would allow plaintiffs to “circumvent” the administrative process and would put more focus on monetary damages.
“Adopting a futility exception would lead to confusion in many IDEA cases, all while producing little benefit in the rare cases like this one,” attorneys for Sturgis schools wrote. “And Perez’s rule, in all likelihood, will prioritize money over education, reducing parties’ willingness to settle and producing the very harm Perez decries — all in the pursuit of damages the ADA probably doesn’t even authorize.”
A friend-of-the-court brief filed by the AASA, the School Superintendents Association, and others put it this way:
“Weakening the exhaustion requirement will undermine the collaborative nature of the IDEA process, and will shift the parties’ focus to money rather than the students’ education needs, will waste money on litigation that could more effectively be spent on students themselves, and will discourage settlements by making them more expensive.”
The National School Boards Association, joined by its 600-member Michigan counterpart, in a brief noted the IDEA process is less expensive and less contentious than litigation. Requiring parents to exhaust it allows a local education agency to “correct any errors quickly and in a manner far less likely to undermine irrevocably the family/school relationship," they argued.
“The court should not lose sight of the fact that litigation remains available to the parties in the rare instances in which the IDEA administrative process cannot remedy the issues presented,” lawyers for the school board associations wrote in a court brief.
Martinez called the circumvention argument a “red herring,” saying parents in these situations are going to want to seek and obtain all the relief that’s available to them under both statutes — IDEA and ADA. He noted that’s what Luna Perez did in this situation — he didn’t circumvent the IDEA process but pursued both sets of claims.
Nearly 80% of due process complaints filed nationwide under IDEA and resolved in 2018–19 were resolved without a formal hearing, according to data from the Center for Appropriate Dispute Resolution in Special Education. Another study by the same center in 2020 suggested that 90% of due-process complaints are withdrawn, dismissed or resolved without a hearing.
That’s likely because the formal IDEA hearing process is time-consuming and expensive, often requiring plaintiffs to hire a lawyer or an expert to testify, said Leslie Salzman, who teaches disability law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City and runs a clinical program representing people with disabilities.
“It's a big pain in the neck. So if the school district offers what you think you’re likely to get at end of the day after a hearing, you’ll settle it," said Salzman, who led a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Luna Perez with 22 other professors who write or teach in the area of disability law, civil rights or administrative law.
"That’s what they did with Miguel. They offered him a very good package of services to make up for his lost educational time and said, 'This is going to resolve all of your IDEA claims.' And he agreed to release the school district from any further liability on the IDEA claims."
The high court took up a question about the IDEA’s exhaustion requirement in 2017 in another Michigan case, Fry v. Napoleon Community Schools, involving a Jackson-area girl with cerebral palsy who wasn’t allowed to bring her service dog to school.
But in deciding Fry, the justices didn’t resolve the confusion around the exhaustion rule, “which is why a very parallel case is coming up not very many years later,” Salzman said.
Salzman called the facts alleged in the case of Luna Perez particularly “egregious,” in part because of how long he was denied an interpreter and the misinformation given to his parents ― Mexican immigrants who speak only Spanish.
Luna Perez arrived in the United States and enrolled in Sturgis schools at age 9 without knowing any formal sign language and without being able to read or write. Over the years, his teachers at Sturgis had given him A's and B's, and he appeared on the honor roll each semester, so his parents had assumed he would graduate from high school, according to court records.
But a few months beforehand, the school told the family that he’d only be eligible for a “certificate of completion” rather than a diploma.
After leaving Sturgis schools, Luna Perez made progress in acquiring American Sign Language at the Michigan School for the Deaf, from which he graduated with a diploma in 2020. But his lawyers said the years of language deprivation he experienced at Sturgis caused long-term language deficits that have limited his vocational prospects to “unskilled” work and reduced his lifetime earning capacity about 40%, according to a vocational expert cited in a court brief last year.
"At MSD, I learned so many new words and signs. I learned construction. I helped others in my class to measure, and I got to build chairs and tables. I learned about building houses. I want to build houses as a job," Luna Perez said in his statement provided with assistance of a Certified Deaf Interpreter and ASL translator.
Luna Perez, who is currently unemployed and living in Michigan, plans to travel to Washington to attend Wednesday’s arguments at the Supreme Court, which agreed to allow interpreters to sign for him, Martinez said.
"My case at the U.S. Supreme Court is hard for me to understand. Part of it is about having no interpreter at Sturgis. Part of it is that some judges said I can’t tell my story in court," Luna Perez said in his statement.
"I want to tell my story in court. I wish I could have gone to college. I don’t have a job, but I want to have one. I want to make my own choices."
When asked about the case, Sturgis Superintendent Arthur Ebert last week declined to discuss its details. He joined the district in July 2018 after it had settled Luna Perez’s IDEA claims.
“I can share that I believe that every experience provides us with an opportunity to learn and grow,” Ebert said by email. “Through this too; we will gain knowledge, insight and understanding that will help us maximize every student's true potential.”
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