Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law
Since 1972, the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law has advocated for the civil rights, full inclusion, and equality of adults and children with mental disabilities. The Bazelon Center was pivotal in expanding the civil rights movement to include fighting discrimination against, and segregation of, people with mental disabilities. Today, the Center accomplishes its goals through a unique combination of litigation, public policy advocacy, coalition building and leadership, public education, media outreach, and technical assistance—a comprehensive approach that ensures the largest possible impact.
The Bazelon Center uses cutting-edge litigation to effect progressive systemic change and impact public policy. We secured early legal precedents creating basic civil rights for people with mental disabilities—including the rights to a public education, receive services in community based settings instead of institutions, and make decisions about one’s own care. The Center was instrumental in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 and played a key role in the historic case of Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), in which the Supreme Court found that needless segregation of people with psychiatric disabilities violates the ADA. Over the last decade, the Bazelon Center has worked to expand the reach of Olmstead to address not only unnecessary institutionalization in public facilities (e.g., psychiatric and criminal justice), but also to remedy segregation in nursing homes, board and care homes, schools and classrooms, sheltered workshops, and other day services. Our Olmstead work has created legal precedents defining a national model of comprehensive community-based disability systems and led to settlement agreements providing thousands of individuals with opportunities to move out of segregated, dead-end facilities and to live full lives in their communities.
THE CASE
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In 2018, the Bazelon Center, along with co-counsel Disability Rights DC at University Legal Services, the National Center for Youth Law, and the law firm Schulte, Roth & Zabel, filed a class action on behalf of hundreds of District of Columbia children who are unnecessarily institutionalized or at serious risk of unnecessary institutionalization. The complaint alleges widespread failures by DC’s children’s mental health system to provide federally required intensive community-based services for children in their own homes, schools, and elsewhere in the community. As a result, the District’s children suffer drastically curtailed life opportunities, cycling in and out of psychiatric hospitals, psychiatric residential treatment facilities that are often hundreds or thousands of miles away from their families, other residential treatment centers, juvenile detention facilities, and group homes. The complaint alleges violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Medicaid Act. The ADA requires the District to serve its children with disabilities in the most integrated setting appropriate. For virtually all children, this setting is their own home or another family or foster home. The Medicaid Act requires the District to provide intensive community-based services to all children with mental health disabilities who need them, to help them live in their own homes and communities, and participate fully in family and community life.
The proposed case seeks to reform the behavioral health system for Medicaid-eligible children and youth in the District. The case clarifies states’ obligations under the Medicaid Act, the ADA, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which apply to all state Medicaid programs and/or recipients of federal financial assistance. This litigation will establish that states and other jurisdictions must provide intensive community-based services (ICBS) to Medicaid eligible children and youth under the Medicaid Act’s Early Prevention, Detection, Screening and Treatment (EPSDT) mandate. Without these intensive services, children and youth with mental health disabilities are unnecessarily institutionalized, or at serious risk of institutionalization, in violation of the community integration mandate of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), identified in the Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead v. L.C.
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The Bazelon Center has long worked to ensure that children with mental health disabilities have the same educational opportunities as their non-disabled peers. As part of this advocacy, and using funding from the Barbara McDowell and Gerald S. Hartman Foundation, the Bazelon Center has filed a case challenging Georgia's system of segregated educational centers, known collectively as the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Services, or GNETS. The Bazelon Center and its co-counsel represent three current and former GNETS students as well as a class of students with disabilities now in GNETS or at serious risk of being placed in GNETS. Other plaintiffs include the Georgia Advocacy Office and The Arc of the United States. The plaintiffs allege that Georgia’s use of the GNETS system violates the ADA, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Equal Protection Clause by denying equal educational opportunity to children with disability-related behavioral needs and by needlessly segregating them in separate and inferior classrooms and schools. The defendants include the Georgia Board of Education, Department of Education, Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, Department of Community Health, and several individuals in their official capacities.
Approximately 5,200 students with disabilities are in the GNETS system. In a series of investigative articles published last year, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that GNETS operates 53 segregated “centers,” where only children with disabilities are enrolled, as well as satellite classrooms, also segregated by disability, attached to numerous neighborhood schools. GNETS students are disproportionately children of color – 51 percent versus 37 percent in all public schools statewide. In some areas, the percentage of African-American students in GNETS exceeds 60 percent, and in one program, almost 9 out of every 10 students are African American. See Judd, A. “Georgia ‘psychoeducational’ students segregated by disability, race,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution (April 28, 2016).
The lawsuit seeks an injunction requiring Georgia to provide students with disability-related behavioral needs appropriate services in neighborhood schools alongside their non-disabled peers. Unless these concerns are resolved, students segregated in GNETS will continue to fall further behind in school, be less likely to graduate, and be more likely to enter the criminal justice system.
CASE UPDATES SINCE GRANT YEAR
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On March 19, 2020, the court overseeing the case denied the State’s motion to dismiss the complaint, finding for plaintiffs on all issues. The court acknowledged the plaintiffs’ contentions that unnecessary segregation in GNETS schools and classrooms stigmatizes students with disabilities, in violation of the ADA, and held that the State must demonstrate a substantial interest in segregating the students to show that such segregation is constitutional. The court’s decision permitted fact-finding in the case to begin and we are currently in the discovery phase. The Court denied our (delayed) request that our case be consolidated with a parallel case filed by the U.S. Department of Justice being heard by another judge. Nonetheless, we and DOJ are collaborating. One of our experts will soon tour some of the regional GNETS programs. It looks like the funding structure for GNETS may be changing, in large part as a result of our case. If that change occurs, we will need to evaluate its impact. One possibility is that we will join some local school districts as defendants.
CASE UPDATE - 2020
The Barbara McDowell Foundation provided support to our ongoing case, Georgia Advocacy Office, et al v. State of Georgia, et al. The Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, along with co-counsel the Center for Public Representation, the Georgia Advocacy Office, the Arc of the United States, the law firm of DLA Piper, and the Goodmark Law Firm, assert that the State of Georgia is discriminating against thousands of public school students with disabilities by placing them in the separate and unequal Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Supports Program (GNETS). The complaint, filed in United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, alleges that GNETS students are unnecessarily segregated and denied the opportunity to be educated in local schools alongside their non-disabled peers in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The current status of the case is that the Defendants filed a motion to dismiss, and we are waiting on a decision from the Court. In addition, we are preparing to file a motion for class certification.
This case will have significant impact in Georgia. Approximately 5,200 students with disabilities are in the GNETS system. As described in our complaint, GNETS operates 53 segregated “centers,” where only children with disabilities are enrolled, as well as satellite classrooms, also segregated by disability, attached to numerous neighborhood schools. In addition, GNETS students are disproportionately children of color – 54 percent versus 37 percent in all public schools statewide. In half of the GNETS schools, the number of African-American students is more than 50 percent. And in one program, 9 out of every 10 students are African American.
GRANT AMOUNT
$50,000 (2023) $25,000 (2018)
MEDIA COVERAGE
The Atlantic: The Separate, Unequal Education of Students with Special Needs
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Georgia psychoeducational schools an unconstitutional 'dumping ground,' new suit claims
The New Yorker: Georgia’s Separate and Unequal Special –Education System
“The grant from the Barbara McDowell Foundation allowed us to make a significant investment in the case, allowing it to move forward, including recruiting a team of impressive experts."
– Legal Director Ira Burnim states,