Parents and guardians of children with disabilities living in the District of Columbia (DC), along with The Arc of the United States, filed a class action lawsuit against DC’s Office of the State Superintendent for Education (OSSE) for failing to provide safe, reliable and effective transportation to and from schools for children with disabilities, thereby denying students equal access to their education and unnecessarily segregating them from their peers.

According to the complaint, the OSSE Division of Transportation (OSSE DOT) has continually failed to provide consistent, safe and properly equipped transportation:

• Buses routinely arrive very late to pick students up from their homes, or do not arrive at all, causing kids to miss an exorbitant number of school days. One 14-year-old student was late to school 90 times in the 2022 – 2023 school year.
• Students are picked up early from school and miss critical instructional time or are left stranded at school without guaranteed transportation back home. “Because [my child] consistently arrived home late, he would miss critical therapies that were ordered by his doctor,” said Veronica Guerrero, plaintiff and mother of a 14-year-old student.
• Students are forced to spend excessive time on the bus, causing physical and mental harm when they are unable to access food, medication or toilets. As a result, one 13-year-old student with a rare chromosomal disorder has arrived home on multiple occasions with a soiled diaper.
• Buses do not provide appropriate accommodations (including properly trained medical personnel) and equipment that children with disabilities need to ride the bus safely. One eight-year-old student’s medical conditions require that she ride the bus with a nurse present. On multiple occasions, and without notice to the family, the bus arrives without a nurse onboard to properly care for her.
• Buses cannot be reliably tracked, and families have no way to find out where their children are located while riding a bus. One 11-year-old student was missing for four hours before school staff located him.

Read our initial press release, here and a more recent update, here.