‘Let Me Go!’: Judge Sides with Black Middle Schooler with Disabilities Who Was Cuffed Four Times By School Police, Issues Scathing Order to California School District
The parents of a Black middle school student who was repeatedly physically restrained and handcuffed by school police for misbehavior related to his disabilities have won out after a precedent-setting five-year legal battle with the local school district and sheriff’s department in southern California. After presiding over the racial and disability discrimination lawsuit since 2021, U.S. District Judge Jesus G. Bernal approved settlement agreements last fall ordering Moreno Valley United School District (MVUSD) to pay the minor plaintiff, “C.B.” $1.2 million and Riverside County and its sheriff’s department to pay $650,000 to the boy, who was 10 and 11 years old when he was allegedly mistreated by campus security officers (CSOs) and deputy sheriffs assigned as school resource officers (SROs). But the case has dragged on this year as the parties continued to haggle over attorneys' fees, which Bernal had ruled must be paid by the school district to counsel for the plaintiffs, whom he deemed the prevailing party. A student with ADHD and other disabilities was illegally restrained and handcuffed by school police at two middle schools in Moreno Valley United School District (right) four times in 2019, a federal lawsuit filed by his mother and father (left) claim. The family will get $1.85 million per two recent settlements with defendants in the case. (Photos: KCAL News screenshot, Riverside County Sheriff's Department via Plaintiffs' Complaint) On Oct. 3, the judge brought the hammer down, ordering the school district to pay plaintiffs’ attorneys $5.3 million in legal fees and $50,000 in case-related costs. His ruling noted that California and federal law allow a court to award "enhanced" attorneys’ fees to a successful party “in any action which has resulted in the enforcement of an important right affecting the public interest if (a) significant benefit … has been conferred on the general public.” ‘Show Me Your ID!’: White Seattle Man Shoots Black Disabled Veteran In the Chest In Broad Daylight After Demanding He Show Him Proof of His Service The plaintiffs — C.B., and his mother and father as guardians ad litem — in a case litigated on their behalf by nonprofits Disability Rights California, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, and a private law firm, had already won a major legal victory in the case in October 2023. Judge Bernal ruled then that the school district had violated the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and other federal disability law when it allowed school police to remove and restrain students with disabilities without training the officers on the special needs of those students, including providing accommodations and behavioral interventions when they act out. C.B., who was 4 feet 8 inches and weighed about 70 pounds, was handcuffed and removed from class or school four times over a four-month period in 2019 during incidents when he allegedly cursed and ripped up paper, got into a shoving match with another student, and threw a rock in the direction of a campus security officer.His behavior in all of the incidents was related to his disabilities, the complaint contended, including Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and Intermittent Explosive Disorder, which “make it difficult for him to regulate his emotions, maintain focus, communicate and promptly comply with directions.” During one incident in August 2019, school police officers dragged C.B. from the school playground to a seclusion room, where he began pulling away, pushing and swinging his arms in an attempt to free himself from the room, the complaint said. At the direction of school principal Scott Walker, the officers tackled C.B. and shackled his wrists and ankles with metal cuffs, “causing him to be even more upset and distressed.” The officers violated a school district policy against immobilizing all four limbs of a student, the lawsuit alleged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?vcXFByFK6ZFE School Resource Officer body cam video of Oct. 8, 2019 incident when minor student "C.B." was handcuffed, restrained and removed from his classroom. (Video: Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund) School resource officer body camera video captured part of an incident at Landmark Middle School on Oct. 8, 2019, when Riverside County Deputy Sheriff Norma Loza and school CSO Manuel Arellano entered C.B.’s classroom to investigate an allegation that he had thrown a rock in the direction of Arellano the day before. C.B. can be seen sitting with his head down on his desk while Loza told him, “You’re going to the office, no matter what. Either you go, cooperating, or I’m going to take you to the office.” The boy then swore at the officers and said that he was not going. Within 90 seconds of their arrival, the officers pulled C.B. from his desk, pushed him facedown to the ground and handcuffed his hands behind his back, as one officer pinned his knee in the boy’s back. “Let me go! Let me go!” the boy cried out, expressing that he was in pain. He was taken to a police car, where he managed to call his mother on his cellphone while handcuffed. She asked the officers to let her come pick him up at school, but they said no and sent him via ambulance to an emergency treatment facility for a mental evaluation. A few days later, C.B. was suspended from school. The SROs violated their own policies when they handcuffed C.B., who was 11 years old at the time, the lawsuit said. The sheriff’s department standards manual says that children age 11 or younger should not be handcuffed unless they are “combative or threatening,” a standard “susceptible to implicit and explicit racial biases," the complaint argued, since “officers are more likely to view ambiguous or disability-related behavior as ‘combative or threatening’ when shown by Black students rather than white students.” A behavior plan created for C.B. with a team including his parents and special education teacher called for interventions such as "de-escalation, patience, communication, and waiting" when he acted out, the lawsuit said. But school police, unaware of the behavior plan and untrained in how to handle conflicts involving students with disabilities, instead injured and traumatized C.B., the lawsuit claimed, when they immediately resorted to physically restraining him, sometimes tackling him, sitting on him and handcuffing his arms behind his back before hauling him away in a police vehicle. The lawsuit alleged that the defendants — Moreno Valley Unified School District, its superintendent, two middle school principals, and two CSOs; and Riverside County, its sheriff’s department, and two deputy sheriffs working as SROs — violated C.B.’s federal civil rights and state law by subjecting him to excessive force, unreasonable seizure, false imprisonment, assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It also accused the school district of violating the ADA and Section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act, and of providing negligent training and supervision of both its staff and the county SROs. C.B. suffered severe emotional distress, pain, humiliation and exacerbation of his disabilities, as he continued to experience fear, distrust and anxiety regarding law enforcement officers years later, the complaint said. “No student should have to experience what our son endured,” said C.B.’s father, identified in the complaint as as “W.B.,” in a statement in 2021 after the lawsuit was filed. “No police should slam a child to the ground and handcuff them when they aren’t doing anything wrong. … My son should not have had to call me from the back of the police car begging for help. ... There should be better staff or therapists to help disabled children, and there should not be police at schools, especially when they abuse students that they are not trained to serve or support.” The plaintiffs sought a jury trial to determine compensatory, general and punitive monetary damages, as well as court injunctions to stop school police officers from manually restraining students and intervening in low-level and disability-related behaviors, and to provide C.B. and other disabled students “with positive supports and services in lieu of police intervention so they may enjoy full and equal access to the District’s programs.” In their initial answers to the complaint, the Moreno Valley school district and its employees and Riverside County, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department and its deputies denied all of the allegations of constitutional and civil rights violations, and claimed immunity from liability as public employees. In September 2023, the defendants associated with the school district argued in a memorandum opposing the plaintiffs’ motion for partial summary judgment that the district had complied with the ADA and other federal disability law in how it trained school staff and treated students with disabilities. The district said its special education teachers, school nurses and school psychologists had training and education in how to deal with students with special needs, but that campus security officers did not, and were not required to “because they are not considered special education staff personnel under the IDEIA (the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act) and California Education Code.” The defense memorandum stated that “federal and state laws recognize that special education students may be violent” and noted that special education staff and parents work together to develop a behavior support plan to address the student’s violence by, for example, “giving the student space and/or time to calm down.” Sometimes, “if the behavior plan does not work to address the student’s violence …contacting an SRO who is nearby is the most quick and accessible way” for a teacher to respond to a situation where a student may present harm to himself or others, the district said, and the school security personnel may need to use “standardized restraints” including handcuffs to prevent harm to the student, staff or other students. The district said that C.B.’s behavior support plan in April 2019 “indicated that he had tendencies to ‘punch, kick, and/or bite’” and “to become ‘physically aggressive.’” The plan also “identified what C.B.’s conduct achieved for him, namely the ability to avoid classwork, the ability to avoid following the same rules as his classmates, and the ability to get out of school when he is sent home for his negative behavior.” Principal Walker had many interactions with C.B. on campus, the filing said, and “knew that he was a special education student in an emotionally disturbed class and sometimes had defiance issues.” Regarding the August 2019 incident at Landmark Middle School, Walker said he saw C.B. “trying to evade campus supervisors, hitting, kicking and saying bad language.” Walker assisted in taking the boy to “the cooldown room” where he was “kicking and biting as they were trying to talk him down and tell him everything would be okay.” Because the situation was escalating, Walker removed all the tables and chairs from the room to keep C.B. from hurting himself, then contacted the school psychologist to come assist, the defense attorneys wrote. The principal directed that handcuffs be removed from the boy after conferring with the psychologist and a special education teacher who advised that the handcuffs were “not in C.B.’s best interest.” C.B. kept trying to escape, the defense filing claimed, but after a family member arrived, “all of rage just went away, and that family member said, ‘Hey, stop it, let’s go,’ and C.B. “just calmed down, and off he went.” The lawsuit, the school district argued, “attempts to hold every employee of the District to the same standard as his special education teachers and aids. To accommodate his aggressive and violent behavior until he calms down, whether it endangers himself or others, or whether it results in property damage. … Plaintiff provides absolutely no expert opinion or legal authority that suggests that the types of de-escalation by District personnel are not appropriate when a student with a disability is violently and aggressive lashing out.”In his ruling on the motion in October 2023, Judge Bernal wrote that “it is undisputed that C.B. is a qualified individual with a disability,” defined under the ADA “as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. … Here, Plaintiff’s ADHD and ODD have substantially limited the major life activities of thinking, learning and concentrating.”He noted that district policy “requires CSOs to treat all students the same and to make no exceptions for disability-related behavior in their enforcement of school rules and regulations. CSOs do not investigate the reasons behind a student’s behavior, and therefore do not ascertain whether the behavior is disability related. MVUSD does not train CSOs about the rights of students with disabilities, even though CSOs regularly interact with disabled students” and “no MVUSD policy requires or outlines how CSOs should provide disability-specific accommodations or de-escalation strategies to prevent removal and restraints of disabled students.” “MVUSD does not maintain a policy that CSOs should be informed about a student’s disability or the accommodations and supports identified in the student’s IEP , Section 504 Plan, or behavior plans," the judge observed. "MVUSD provides no training to SROs, and MVUSD’s contract with the Sheriff’s Department does not inform SROs about its students with disabilities or the accommodations to which those students are entitled.”Bernal also found that the plaintiffs had demonstrated that the school district’s data showed that the district uses “methods of administration that have resulted in the disproportionate and discriminatory use of removal and physical restraints as well as law enforcement referrals as a response to disability-related behaviors.” In the 2018-19 school year, students with disabilities were 2.6 times more likely to be restrained than their non-disabled peers and Black students with disabilities were 3.26 times more likely to be restrained, the lawsuit asserted. The judge wrote that the plaintiffs contended that “there is no dispute that MVUSD’s policies and trainings, along with the absence of necessary policies and trainings, subject qualified individuals with disabilities to discrimination on the basis of disability through disproportionate use of restraints and referrals of disabled students to CSOs and SROs. The Court agrees.” In June 2024 Bernal issued a permanent injunction ordering the school district to make extensive district-wide reforms, reducing the removal and restraint of disabled and Black disabled students from classrooms, as well as reducing its reliance on school police and security officers to respond to students with disabilities. The district was also required to implement comprehensive training for school-based staff, and to collect and monitor data.An action plan was finalized in April 2025, and an independent monitor overseeing the reforms posts progress reports on a public website. The latest progress report in October showed that out-of-school suspensions and referrals to law enforcement of MVUSD students with disabilities and Black students with disabilities had decreased over the prior school year. Use of physical restraints on those student groups had stayed about the same.C.B. is now 17 years old and attends high school in a different school district in California, Leah Kang, one of his attorneys with Disability Rights California, told Atlanta Black Star.“He works daily to put the events that were the subject of the lawsuit behind him,” she said in an emailed statement. “Despite the psychological, emotional, and educational setbacks caused by those events, C.B. dreams of owning his own business one day.”C.B. and his parents “are particularly hopeful that the court-ordered systemic reforms to Moreno Valley Unified School District's school policing policies will mean other students with disabilities and other Black students with disabilities will not be subject to the kind of trauma C.B. endured.” Kang also confirmed that both the county and school district defendants have paid the court-approved settlements owed to C.B. and that a trust was established for him where the funds are being kept. Attorneys for the school district did not immediately return a request for comment from Atlanta Black Star.
