Human Rights & Education
OVERVIEW
This is the 4th of 4 videos in our short series on Human Rights and Education, in collaboration with ARCH Disability Law Centre.
This video explains some of the legal limits to a school’s duty to accommodate, while emphasizing that students still have strong rights to support.
You will learn:
how schools interpret disability-related needs
what “undue hardship” means in relation to cost and health or safety risks
how even when one specific accommodation is not possible, schools must still look for other ways to meet a student’s disability-related needs
You can find the transcription for this video here (including visual descriptions for the video).
Refer to our glossary if you’re having trouble understanding any of the terms in this series.
What are the legal limits to a school’s duty to accommodate?
A school is only required to provide accommodations that meet the student’s disability-related needs, not their preferences. The school has a duty to accommodate their student’s needs, to the point of undue hardship.
What are the conditions for undue hardship?
An accommodation may cause undue hardship if it either costs way too much money or brings a serious health or safety risk. But, the school cannot say something is too costly unless the cost is so high that they do not have money in their budget for it. The school has to prove this. Also, before saying an accommodation cost too much money, the school has to first consider if there are any outside sources of funding to help pay for it. This means the school has to first look if they can get financial help from the government or other organizations.
Even if a specific accommodation is undue hardship for the school, the school needs to look other possible accommodations to put in place instead, while still meeting the student’s needs.