Winkelman v. Parma City School District

Yes. The Court reversed the Sixth Circuit by a 7-2 vote, ruling that "[p]arents enjoy rights under IDEA; and they are, as a result, entitled to prosecute IDEA claims on their own behalf." Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion held that since the IDEA gives parents enforceable rights in the administrative stage of disputes over "free appropriate public education," it would be inconsistent if they could not exercise the same rights in federal court. An interpretation where some rights inhere and both parents and child while others inhere only in the child would be unnecessarily confusing and was not indicated by the text and structure of IDEA. Therefore the Court ruled that a parent can be a "party aggrieved" under the statute and that sections referring to the rights of the child need not be read to exclude the parent. The dissenters would have held that IDEA gives parents the right to represent themselves in court when they seek reimbursement or challenge violations of their own procedural rights, but not when they challenge the adequacy of their child's free appropriate public education. Justice Antonin Scalia argued that the child, as the one who is receiving the education, is the only one with a right to it, and he accused the majority of "spraying statutory sections about like buckshot [to] create a substantive parental right to education where none exists."