The campus in court: Family & Children's Center v. School City of Mishawaka

1991 — decided 5 January 1994

The children's home sued the school city over who would teach its children: The fight grew out of the campus's own school. Until 1979, children with disabilities in the Mishawaka area attended the Mishawaka public schools; in that year, responding to the large number of children with disabilities who had been suspended or expelled for behavior related to their handicaps, the center began educating the children itself, at its own expense. A 1982 Instructional Services Agreement settled the arrangement for a time — the school city passed through 95 percent of the transfer tuition received from the children's home counties, and the center continued its educational program. By 1989 the arrangement failed under the weight of the placements themselves: more children, and a greater degree of emotional impairment among them. The center insisted the school city was shirking its statutory duty to provide a free appropriate public education; the two locked horns over facilities — the center holding that the school city must provide classrooms, the school city that it would supply staff and program but not rent — and over the South Bend group homes, whose children the school city refused to educate during their periods of treatment there, a refusal that in practice kept children out of the group-home placements their treatment called for. The procedural course is documented at every step. The center's complaint to the Indiana Department of Education of 17 September 1991 was decided against it by the Division of Special Education on 9 December 1991, reconsideration denied 14 January 1992; the facilities question was dismissed on 15 May 1992 as a transfer-tuition matter, tuition being payable only to a school corporation, which the center was not. The center sued in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana on 29 May 1992 under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and on 19 March 1993 the district court dismissed for lack of standing: only parents, guardians, and surrogate parents, it held, could raise the children's rights — and the center was none of those. The Seventh Circuit reversed on 5 January 1994. The question, the court of appeals framed it, was whether the center should be accorded third-party standing to advocate the rights of children placed in its physical but not legal custody; it held that the center could sue on the children's behalf, and the dismissal fell. Rehearing was denied on 15 March 1994. The holding is a standing holding, and it is printed as one: the 1994 opinion decided who may bring such a case, not what the school city owed — the merits of classrooms and tuition were not decided in it. What the case establishes for this record is plainer than its doctrine: by the 1990s the Mishawaka campus was a treatment institution of regional draw, holding more than a hundred emotionally handicapped children on court and welfare placements, running its own school, and litigating in the federal courts as the children's advocate of last resort because no one else stood in the position to do it.

Sources:

1. Family & Children's Center, Inc. v. School City of Mishawaka, 13 F.3d 1052 (7th Cir., decided 5 January 1994; rehearing and suggestion for rehearing en banc denied 15 March 1994) — the facts, the 1979 school, the 1982 agreement and its 95 percent pass-through, the facilities and group-home disputes, the administrative course of 1991–92, the district court's dismissal of 19 March 1993, and the reversal on third-party standing, each as the opinion states them.