As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to begin its October 2026 Term, two special education cases are asking the Justices to step in. The cases could hardly be more different.

One, D.C. v. Fairfax County School Board, comes directly out of the IDEA’s dispute-resolution system and asks whether families alleging systemic violations must first exhaust administrative due process procedures that cannot provide the relief they seek.

The other, Hellman v. Craven, involves children with disabilities attending private religious schools in Massachusetts. It asks whether a state may provide special education benefits to private-school students while requiring those students to leave their private schools to receive the services.

Neither case has been accepted by the Supreme Court. Both are currently petitions for writs of certiorari—requests that the Court hear the cases. But together they raise two fundamentally different questions about access to special education: Who gets access to federal court? And where may publicly funded special education services be delivered?

D.C. v. Fairfax County: Must Families Exhaust a System They Are Challenging?

The first case comes from Virginia.

In D.C. v. Fairfax County School Board, No. 26-215, children with disabilities, their parents, and Hear Our Voices, Inc. sued the Fairfax County School Board and Virginia Department of Education. Their claims were not limited to whether one student’s IEP provided FAPE. Instead, they alleged widespread problems with Virginia’s IDEA administrative system itself. 

The allegations are sweeping. The petition describes asserted practices involving delays and obstruction in evaluation and IEP processes, inflated grades and representations of student progress, withholding or manipulation of records, problems involving hearing officer neutrality, and deficiencies in the state complaint and due process systems. The plaintiffs sought broad injunctive relief directed at both Fairfax County and the state. 

The important point at this stage is that these are allegations. The Supreme Court is not presently being asked to decide whether those allegations are true.

The question is much narrower and potentially much more important:

Must parents first exhaust IDEA administrative proceedings when they are challenging systemic defects in the administrative system itself and the hearing officer cannot provide the systemic relief they are requesting?

The Fourth Circuit said yes.

A divided panel affirmed dismissal of the claims. The majority concluded that characterizing alleged violations as systemic does not eliminate IDEA’s exhaustion requirement. The plaintiffs therefore could not bypass the administrative process simply because they believed proceeding through it would be futile. 

Judge Roger Gregory dissented. His objection gets to the heart of the petition: if the claim is that the due process system itself is defective, and an individual hearing officer has no power to reform that system, what exactly is accomplished by requiring a family to go through the hearing first?

The petition emphasizes that the declaratory and injunctive relief sought by the plaintiffs could not have been awarded by an IDEA hearing officer. 

That matters because other federal circuits have treated systemic claims differently. The petition identifies a split among the courts of appeals, arguing that the Second and Third Circuits have expressly excused exhaustion in certain systemic IDEA cases and that several other circuits have recognized similar principles. 

The Supreme Court has touched this territory before. In Luna Perez v. Sturgis Public Schools (2023), it held that IDEA exhaustion was not required when a plaintiff sought a remedy under another federal statute that the IDEA could not provide. D.C. asks the Court to move the exhaustion analysis another step: what happens when the claim is under the IDEA, but the relief sought is beyond the authority of an individual IDEA hearing officer?

The Supreme Court docketed the petition on August 19. It has been distributed for the Justices’ September 28 conference. 

Why D.C. v. Fairfax matters

A decision for the petitioners could be significant well beyond Virginia.

IDEA due process has traditionally been built around an individual child: identification, evaluation, placement, services, and FAPE. A holding that systemic challenges may proceed directly to federal court could create a much clearer avenue for lawsuits challenging state complaint systems, hearing-officer structures, statewide policies, or districtwide practices without first litigating a child’s individual case.

That does not mean parents could simply label ordinary IEP disagreements “systemic” and head directly to federal court. Courts would still have to distinguish genuine structural challenges from individual FAPE disputes dressed in systemic language.

But the line would matter enormously.

For state departments of education in particular, this is a case to watch closely.

Hellman v. Craven: Special Education Meets Private-School Choice

The second petition arrives from Massachusetts and presents an entirely different issue.

In Hellman v. Craven, No. 26-97, two families have children with disabilities attending private Jewish schools. Massachusetts provides parentally placed private-school students with an individual state-law entitlement to publicly funded special education services. But Massachusetts regulations generally require state- and locally funded special education services for those students to be delivered at a public school or another public or “neutral” site—not on the private-school campus. 

That distinction is critical.

Under the federal IDEA alone, a parent who voluntarily places a child in a private school generally does not retain an individual entitlement to the same FAPE the child would receive in public school. IDEA instead provides for proportionate-share services for the population of parentally placed private-school students.

Massachusetts has chosen to provide more than IDEA requires.

The constitutional question is what Massachusetts may require once it chooses to provide that additional benefit.

The families argue that requiring their children to leave their private schools to obtain special education places an unconstitutional burden on their right to choose private education. The Supreme Court petition frames the issue under the unconstitutional conditions doctrine—the principle that government ordinarily cannot condition receipt of a public benefit on surrendering a constitutional right.

The precise question presented is whether that doctrine applies to the parental right recognized in Pierce v. Society of Sisters to send one’s child to a private school. 

The First Circuit rejected the families’ argument. It concluded that the Massachusetts regulation does not prevent families from choosing private education. Instead, it determines where the state will deliver a publicly funded service. Parents remain free to choose a private school, but their children must travel to an approved public or neutral location for the state-funded special education services. The court found that increased logistical burden insufficient to constitute an infringement of the constitutional right to choose private education. 

Massachusetts also points to its state constitutional prohibition against using public funds to aid private schools as justification for the location restriction.

The families see the issue very differently. In their view, Massachusetts cannot first create an individual entitlement to special education for private-school students and then make receipt of that benefit more burdensome because the parents exercised their constitutional right to choose private education.

The case therefore sits at the intersection of special education law, parental rights, school choice, state constitutional no-aid provisions, and the Supreme Court’s expanding body of cases involving public benefits and private or religious education.

And interest in the case is substantial. Amicus briefs have been filed by organizations supporting private education and by a coalition of 14 states. Massachusetts initially waived a response, but the Supreme Court requested one. The state’s response is now due November 10. 

What Hellman would—and would not—do

One caution is especially important.

A ruling for the families would not necessarily establish a nationwide IDEA right for parentally placed private-school students to receive a full IEP or special education services at their private schools.

Families themselves acknowledge that a favorable ruling would not force every state to create Massachusetts-style individual special education entitlements for private-school students. 

The issue is instead what constitutional rules apply after a state voluntarily creates such a benefit.

That distinction should not get lost as this case receives more attention.

Two Cases, Two Very Different Questions

Placed beside one another, these petitions demonstrate just how broad “special education law” has become.

D.C. v. Fairfax County is principally an IDEA procedural case. It asks about exhaustion, hearing-officer authority, systemic violations, and access to federal court.

Hellman v. Craven is primarily a constitutional case that happens to involve special education. It asks whether a state can attach a location condition to a special education benefit when that condition falls differently on families who choose private schools.

One case potentially changes how families challenge special education systems.

The other potentially changes how states structure educational benefits for students who leave the public-school system.

There is another important commonality: neither case asks the Supreme Court simply to determine whether an individual child’s IEP was appropriate. Both ask the Court to look at the architecture surrounding special education—the dispute-resolution system in one case and the relationship between public benefits and private education in the other.

What Happens Next?

For now, these remain petitions, not Supreme Court cases on the merits.

That distinction matters. Thousands of petitions reach the Court, and only a small fraction are granted. The Court’s decision to deny certiorari would not mean that the Justices agreed with the lower court. It would simply leave that decision in place.

D.C. may produce news quickly because it has been distributed for the September 28 conference. Hellman is on a slower track because Massachusetts has until November 10 to respond. 

But both deserve attention from special education administrators, attorneys, advocates, and families.

For years, the Supreme Court’s major special education decisions have tended to arrive one at a time—Endrew F., Fry, Perez, and most recently cases addressing the relationship between disability discrimination law and education.

As the October 2026 Term begins, two very different petitions now give the Court another opportunity to shape the boundaries of special education law.

Whether the Justices take either case remains to be seen.

If they take both, 2026–27 could become a particularly consequential Supreme Court term for special education.