ST. LOUIS — A federal lawsuit alleges two school districts and their officials failed for years to teach an above-average-intelligence child to read or write, then blamed his lack of progress on an alleged “lack of capacity” rather than their own practices.
The complaint, filed Nov. 14 in federal court in St. Louis, claims that the districts’ actions denied the child, identified as G.A., the special-education services required by law, subjected him to disability discrimination, and violated his civil rights under color of state law.
G.A.’s parents removed him from public school after third grade when he had made no measurable gains in reading despite arriving at school every day “ready to work” and giving “full effort,” according to the suit.
The filing states that by the end of third grade, he was still unable to accurately read basic one-syllable words such as “cat,” “dog” or “pig,” even though he consistently scored above the 90th percentile on nationally normed math assessments.
His parents then enrolled him at Churchill, a school specializing in dyslexia.
The complaint argues that the Administrative Hearing Commission erred when it sided with the school districts after the parents challenged the adequacy of his special-education services.
The Commission concluded that G.A.’s profound reading problems were “unfortunate” but stemmed from his lack of “capacity” to learn to read, rather than from the district’s failure to provide an appropriate education.
The lawsuit claims this conclusion contradicted all available evidence and inverted recent Supreme Court precedent by treating the districts’ repeated use of the same unmet reading goal over multiple years as proof that the goal was “challenging,” solely because G.A. never achieved it.
The parents allege that the district’s assertion that they did not “sit idly by” while G.A. failed to progress is inconsistent with the record.
For his entire second-grade year, G.A. was assigned a newly hired special-education teacher who, according to the filing, had no literacy training, no literacy curriculum, no research-based programming and conducted no meaningful data collection.
These deficiencies were so concerning, the lawsuit states, that Rockwood staff documented them internally.
The following year, the districts placed G.A. with a teacher who had no experience teaching the Wilson Reading System, a structured literacy program the districts themselves had previously determined to be effective for him.
According to the complaint, this teacher dismantled the program’s research-based design by ignoring mastery standards, moving him ahead without demonstrating skill acquisition, and failing to provide any lessons with fidelity for the entire year.
The filing alleges that these staffing and instructional decisions were driven not by student need but by an effort to avoid the cost and administrative burden of providing the required services.
As a result, the lawsuit claims, G.A. made no meaningful progress in reading or writing, not because of any inherent inability to learn but because the districts “failed to meet their legal and moral obligations” under federal special-education law.
The parents argue that the districts used the severity of his disability as a justification for stagnation rather than as a reason to intensify services, contrary to the law’s requirement that children with disabilities receive individualized instruction designed to enable meaningful progress and prepare them for further education, employment, and independent living.
The complaint further alleges that instead of providing proper educational services, district officials withheld critical data, misrepresented G.A.’s progress in both formal and informal reporting and coordinated efforts to restrict staff communication with his mother.
The filing states that officials treated his disability as a reason to lower expectations, regarding grade-level attainment as unattainable, rather than adjusting instruction to meet his needs.
By attributing his lack of progress to an alleged lack of capacity and treating him differently from nondisabled peers, the lawsuit claims the districts discriminated against him based on disability and denied both him and his parents equal protection and due process.
The plaintiff is seeking compensatory damages with pre- and post-judgment interest. They are represented by Diane Dragan of Dragan Law Firm in St. Louis.
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, Eastern Division case number: 4:25-cv-01685