Dive Brief:

• A Wetzel County, WV-school board has forced a student with Down Syndrome to leave his current high school and attend another school that they say can better address his disability.
• The decision prompted local uproar; his parents say he was thriving at Hundred High School and had made friends.
• The new school is over an hour away and is the designated destination for students with severe learning disabilities in the county.

Dive Insight:

Many schools and school boards struggle to address the needs of students with disabilities in an appropriate manner. Under federal law, students with disabilities are supposed to be in the least restrictive environment possible. For many disability rights advocates, that means in main-stream classrooms and schools. In practice, many schools struggle to define what that actually means.

Furthermore, students with disabilities often face far harsher disciplinary practices. They are suspended and expelled at higher rates. A recent American Civil Liberties Union investigation found a school resource officer in Kentucky had handcuffed and isolated a young boy with disabilities when he got upset.

But overall, those disparities have drawn less attention. Student performance has made relatively little progress and disabled student policy remains a murky area for many educators and institutions.