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A Massachusetts court decided that children with mental disabilities who might be deemed distracting or unlikely to benefit from an education could be expelled from school. This case would create an early precedent that mentally disabled students could be excluded from compulsory attendance laws. Eventually these laws would run into the equality clause of the 14th amendment.
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The Wisconsin Supreme Court held that a student with mental disabilities could be expelled from school because had physical issues that were deemed distracting to others. This case occurred after the common adoption of compulsory attendance laws. This case would create a precedent that compulsory attendance laws have exceptions, the mentally disabled, that could be applied in other jurisdictions through persuasive authority (Yell, 2019).
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Brown was a monumental decision for civil rights in America. The case centered around the question of whether race based segregation implemented under the philosophy of "separate but equal" was constitutional. The court ruled that it was not and that, "state required or state sanctioned segregation solely on the basis of an individuals unalterable characteristics was unconstitutional thus basically striking down segregation across the entire country (Yell, 2019).
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The Supreme Court of Illinois decided that compulsory attendance laws did not apply to mentally disabled students because they would not benefit from an education (Yell, 2019). This case and decision are interesting because they occurred after Brown and despite the broadening of the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, it shows that the court did not think that it applied to mentally disabled students.
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PARC v. PA that argued that PA was not fulfilling its constitutional duty of equal protection by providing an education for students with "mental retardation (Yell, 2019)". Among 4 points of the case was that, "education cannot be defined as only the provision of academic experiences for children (Yell, 2019). The outcome was that students with mental disabilities would be educated from age 6 - 21 in an environment that was close to the program provided for children without mental disabilities.
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This case also concerned the 14th Amendment and whether or not a group of disabled students had had their rights to due process violated by being excluded from school. The court would find that students with disabilities cannot be denied a public education based strictly o their being disabled. This decision would add disability as a basis of discrimination and therefore a violation of a persons civil rights. The court decision would create procedures that would become EAHCA. (Yell, 2019).