2018 Grantees Submit Case Updates
The Foundation’s 2018 grantees provided the following updates on their grant-funded cases.
Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law
The Bazelon Center, with the generous support of the Barbara McDowell Foundation, and its co-counsel filed a class action lawsuit, Georgia Advocacy Office v. State of Georgia, in October 2017 alleging that the State of Georgia denies equal educational opportunity to and unnecessarily segregates thousands of students with disabilities by placing the students in the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Supports Program (GNETS). As a result of placement in GNETS, students with disabilities receive a separate and inferior education and are denied the opportunity to be educated with their non-disabled peers in neighborhood schools in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Plaintiffs recently filed a brief opposing Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss. In that brief, Plaintiffs set forth in detail why the State’s arguments that its officials are not responsible for operating or administering the GNETS program and that, in any event, that GNETS does not violate the ADA’s Integration Mandate should be rejected. A decision from the court is expected shortly, after which work on discovery and class certification will begin in earnest.
Children’s Advocacy Institute of the University of San Diego School of Law
The Children’s Advocacy Institute (CAI), a 2018 Grantee of the Foundation, is moving closer to filing suit to establish nationally the constitutional right of foster children to attorney representation.
CAI is working with the assistance of outside pro bono counsel, local counsel, and the National Association of Counsel for Children. CAI is reviewing responses received pursuant to its recent public records act request to state and local officials, while completing other pre-filing discovery and related tasks; it hopes to file the complaint before the end of June 2018.
Children’s Rights
Children’s Rights, a 2018 grantee of the Foundation, filed in June 2017 a class action lawsuit, M.B. v. Corsi, in Missouri, a state where foster children are prescribed powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic medications in the absence of an effective system of oversight. The case presents a direct challenge, the first of its kind, to a state’s longstanding failure to ensure the safe administration of psychotropic and antipsychotic medications to children in state foster care.
In January 2018, the Judge denied almost the entirety of Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss the case, and shortly thereafter issued a revised scheduling order that places the case on an aggressive path to trial in January 2019. The case is now in the fact-finding discovery phase. The parties have exchanged requests for document production and interrogatories and the Court has entered a protective order allowing the exchange of confidential information.
Children’s Rights has defended the depositions of our Next Friends and we began our depositions of the State’s witnesses in March 2018. We also filed our motion for class certification in March 2018, and hope to have resolution of that issue by late spring. We are now engaging experts in the fields of child welfare and psychiatry to opine on the issues raised in the case, and will disclose those experts to the Defendants by June 2018.
Legal Services of Alabama
In 2016 and 2017, Alabama’s Department of Human Resources began the implementation of a federal law regarding work requirement for food stamp recipients. In their implementation of the law, the Department provided very complicated notices which did not present adequate information to individuals receiving food stamps leading to tens of thousands of people being terminated from the program. After almost two years without relief, Legal Services of Alabama, a 2018 Grantee, with the support provided by the McDowell Foundation, filed suit against the Department on November 30, 2017.
In response to suit the Department filed a Motion to Dismiss to which Legal Services of Alabama responded in January of 2018. Although the trial court reviewed the motion, it decided to withhold a full hearing or decision on the matter pending settlement negotiations. A settlement conference is currently planned between the parties in early July which Legal Services of Alabama believes will result in changes to policies that will lead to many people being reinstated and policies being changed for future applicants.
Sargent Shriver National Center for Law & Poverty
Shriver Center Defeats Motion to Dismiss
HOPE Fair Housing Center and other plaintiffs represented by grantee, the Shriver Center, and the law firm Relman, Dane & Colfax PLLC is challenging the City of Peoria’s selective enforcement of its nuisance ordinance by targeting African-Americans and survivors of domestic violence that allegedly perpetuates Peoria’s long-standing racial segregation. The Court denied on May 14, 2018, the City’s motion to dismiss plaintiffs for lack of standing.