A parent of a kid with special needs wanted him to go to Willow (formerly Lusher), which is a top-rated school in New Orleans. It's a selective-enrollment school, meaning that students aren't promised entrance. They have to score high enough on an entrance exam and then probably win a lottery, depending on the number of seats available.

From the original thread:

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In a lawsuit filed this week in U.S Eastern District Court, Chris and Cristina Edmunds argue that the Willow School’s entrance exam excludes students with disabilities — including their son Oscar — from moving forward in the application process. As a result, they argue, the process violates state and federal protections for people with disabilities, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Louisiana Human Rights Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the federal law that gives students with disabilities the right to a free and appropriate public education.

Original thread after the parent filed a lawsuit against Willow for having an entrance exam

From the federal court article:

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The student, identified in court documents as O.E., applied for the 2025-2026 school year at The Willow School, a well-regarded arts-based charter school in New Orleans. The nine-year-old boy has profound physical and intellectual disabilities, and had received an Individualized Education Program (IEP) from the district where he previously lived.

NOLA Public Schools are a unique district in the country; only one of their schools is directly run by the board, while the rest are charter schools operated by charter management organizations. The Willow School requires students to pass certain eligibility requirements, including scoring a minimum requirement on the Iowa Assessment. O.E. was unable to meet those requirements. His parents asked the school to waive the testing requirement; the school refused.

O.E.’s parents (his father is a disability attorney) sued the school, claiming that it was using the test to keep out students with disabilities, a violation of state and federal law. They asked that the school either cease using the Iowa Assessment as an admissions requirement or waive it for their son. On March 17, United States District Judge Darrel James Papillion issued a 54 page ruling in favor of the school.

The ruling hangs in part on the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires school districts to provide education for each and every student a free and appropriate public education (FAPE). O.E. argued that each charter school is essentially its own mini-district, responsible for providing FAPE for its students, and entrance requirements are an attempt to avoid that responsibility.

But Papillion argues that the charter schools in the NOLA district (unlike charters in other districts) are part of that district, and a charter school has an obligation to provide FAPE only to those students who enroll in that charter. The obligation to provide FAPE, Papillion argues, rests with the district and not the individual schools. The parents “may apply to any school or schools within the district.”

There’s a bit of circular reasoning here. Willow has no obligation to provide FAPE for a student because they haven’t enrolled the student, and they will not enroll the student in order to avoid any such obligation. The language also raises a special concern in NOLA, where all schools but one are charter schools; under the ruling every one of those charter schools could have requirements that bar a disabled child, leaving the family with no choice but the single traditional public school. Should that single school ever be turned back into a charter school, New Orleans students with IEPs could find themselves with no educational options at all.

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O.E.’s extreme difficult-to-accommodate disabilities make this an extreme case, but it addresses some critical issues in a country where many cities have many charter schools that operate with public taxpayer dollars and call themselves public charter schools, but which use a variety of techniques to screen out students. Are there limits to what charter schools can legally do to “narrow” the application pool? Do they need to operate by the same rules as traditional public schools, or should they be free to control the makeup of their student body? And if it’s the latter, what accommodations are going to be made for the hard-to-educate students that no charter or private school wants?

LINK