Supreme Court to hear case of deaf student who was denied interpreter

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.

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.”