The Fairfax County School Board and the Virginia Department of Education are facing a class action lawsuit for violating the rights of disabled students — building on a history of investigations and one lawsuit probing the treatment of students with special needs in one of the country’s largest school systems.

Filed by the Civil Rights Clinic of Georgetown Law School and the law firms Susman Godfrey and Merritt Law, the class action alleges that Fairfax County School Board and the state’s department of education violated the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) by denying students and families a fair and unbiased-process when raising concerns about specialized education plans.

Passed in 1975, IDEA requires schools using federal dollars to educate children with disabilities in a way that meets their specific needs, via an individualized education program, or an IEP. The act also ensures that the parents or guardians of the child have the opportunity to participate in the creation of their student’s IEP, and entitles them to request a due process hearing should they take issue with some part of the school’s plan for their child’s education. Under the law, that hearing is supposed to occur before an impartial and unbiased officer. Without these due-process hearings, according to the lawsuit, “school districts would be free to ignore requests for services and accomodations, with little consequence.”

But a Freedom of Information Act investigation — prompted by the experience of one family in Fairfax County Public Schools — found that of all hearings requested in Northern Virginia over the past decade, 83% of the hearing officers had never ruled in favor of the child or family. Statewide, approximately two-thirds of hearing officers hadn’t ruled in favor of the child in 20 years. In the past two decades, parents in Virginia won less than 2% of almost 1,400 due process cases brought under the IDEA .

“The data reveals for the first time that Virginia’s due process hearing system is dramatically biased towards school districts and against the parents of disabled children,” reads a press release announcing the suit.

The lawsuit was brought forward by Trevor Chaplick and Vivian Chaplick, the parents of a child with disabilities in Fairfax County.  According to the suit, when they started to challenge their child’s individualized program, they were told by a FCPS social worker that it would be a fruitless venture, as they “would lose.” It prompted the couple to file FOIA requests, revealing the very high percentage of cases that fall in favor of the school system.

Both Trevor and Vivian Chaplick, and Hear Our Voices, and advocacy nonprofit founded by the parents, are named as plaintiffs in the suit. The defendants include the Fairfax County School Board, The Fairfax County Public Schools superintendent Michelle Reid, the Virginia Department of Education, and the Superintendent of Public Instruction of Virginia Department of Education, Jillian Balow.

In addition to reimbursement payments to the family, the lawsuit asks that Virginia establish an independent board to oversee the hearing officer system in the commonwealth, and that both the school district and statewide education department compile monthly statistics on hearing officer rulings.

Wednesday’s suit is the latest lawsuit targeting Fairfax County and the school system’s treatment of students with disabilities. Last December, the school system settled a lawsuit with parents and disability activists over the district’s use of seclusion and restrain. The lawsuit was first filed in 2019, after a WAMU investigation revealed that FCPS used seclusion and restraint hundreds of times, on students as young as six, but some years didn’t report a single instance to federal authorities.

A spokesperson for the county did not immediately return DCist/WAMU’s request for comment.