## Facts

- Four elementary students with serious respiratory disabilities and their parents alleged the students faced heightened risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19.
- A Georgia public school district initially used multiple COVID-19 measures for in-person instruction (including masking, distancing, sanitization, staff vaccination requirements, and quarantine protocols).
- For the 2021–2022 school year, the district offered families a choice between in-person attendance (with assurances that safety protocols would continue) and a system-wide virtual-learning program.
- The families selected in-person instruction based on the district’s representations.
- Before the school year began, the district ended the mask mandate and staff vaccination requirement and relaxed distancing and quarantine practices.
- Believing in-person attendance under the revised protocols posed unacceptable medical risk, the families withdrew the students and enrolled them in virtual school.
- Plaintiffs asserted the virtual option was materially inferior educationally, socially, and therapeutically, and effectively isolated the students because of disability-related vulnerability to COVID-19.
- Plaintiffs sued under Title II of the ADA and § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and sought a preliminary injunction requiring the district to implement specified COVID-19 mitigation measures (including universal masking and stricter distancing/quarantine).

## Issues

1. Whether plaintiffs showed a substantial likelihood that Title II of the ADA and § 504 required the district to implement plaintiffs’ requested, district-wide COVID-19 mitigation measures for in-person school rather than offer virtual instruction.
2. Whether, on the preliminary record, the virtual-school option likely denied plaintiffs “meaningful access” to public education or constituted unlawful disability-based isolation/segregation.
3. Whether plaintiffs satisfied the requirements for a preliminary injunction, particularly a substantial likelihood of success on the merits.

## Decision

- The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial of the preliminary injunction.
- The court held plaintiffs failed to show a substantial likelihood of success on their ADA and § 504 claims.
- The court concluded the district court did not abuse its discretion in determining the virtual-school option plausibly functioned as a reasonable accommodation providing meaningful access at the preliminary-injunction stage.
- Because likelihood of success was not shown, preliminary injunctive relief was not warranted.

## Legal Principles

- Title II of the ADA and § 504 bar disability-based exclusion from, denial of benefits of, or discrimination in public educational services and require reasonable modifications when necessary, absent fundamental alteration or undue burden.
- The governing standard is “meaningful access” to the benefit offered; the statutes do not entitle a student to identical services or the accommodation of the student’s choice.
- A requested accommodation may be unreasonable where it demands broad, system-level operational changes and the public entity offers an alternative that plausibly provides meaningful access.
- The ADA integration mandate does not automatically treat remote instruction as the type of segregation targeted by classic institutionalization or separation claims; the preliminary inquiry turns on whether the alternative amounts to unlawful disability-based exclusion or denial of meaningful access.
- A preliminary injunction is an extraordinary remedy; failure to establish a substantial likelihood of success on the merits defeats the motion.

## Conclusion

The court affirmed denial of a preliminary injunction because plaintiffs did not make the required showing that disability-rights statutes likely compelled court-ordered, district-wide COVID-19 measures for in-person schooling when the district offered a system-wide virtual option that, on the preliminary record, plausibly provided meaningful access to education.


L.E. v. Cobb Cnty. Sch. Dist., 55 F.4th 1296 (11th Cir. 2022)