Judge finally puts suit over LA schools’ Covid measures out of its misery

LOS ANGELES (CN) — A lawsuit originally filed to block the LA Unified School District's student vaccine mandate, but which evolved into a broader challenge against Covid-19 protocols, was finally dismissed Wednesday by a Superior Court judge who said the petitioners' fears had not yet come to pass.

"There is only one example of what LAUSD might do in a public health emergency: the Covid pandemic," Judge Mitchell Beckloff said during a hearing that lasted about ten minutes. "To say we know what action LAUSD is going to take in the face of some new public health emergency is pure speculation."

The hearing was a somewhat anticlimactic end to a lawsuit that was first filed in 2021, as debate over vaccine mandates raged around the country. Indeed, the first few hearings in the case were attended by dozens of parents and anti-vaccine activists, who held handmade signs bearing slogans like "My child, my choice" and "My kids! Not your experiment!"

For Wednesday's hearing, by contrast, not a single person showed up — not even the lawyers, who appeared over Zoom.

The original petitioners were two advocacy groups: Protection of the Educational Rights of Kids and Children's Health Defense, a nonprofit founded by Robert Kennedy Jr., now a third-party candidate for U.S. president. Their suit was aimed at preventing the implementation of a new policy approved by the school district's board of education, which would have removed any student who refused to be vaccinated against the coronavirus from their regular classroom and placed them into a special independent study class, to be held over Zoom.

But the policy was never implemented, in part because Judge Beckloff ruled in a different case that only state health officials could implement a vaccine mandate, and the school board had exceeded its authority. In fact, though it promised to do so, the state never did add the Covid inoculation to the list of 10 vaccines students must get before attending public school.

The decision in the other case rendered the Children's Health Defense suit moot, with leave to file an amended complaint. The following version — the petitioners' third — took aim at other Covid countermeasures, like masking, testing and temporary quarantines. Those measures, too, were relaxed as the Covid death rate subsided.

At a hearing in March, Beckloff dismissed that complaint as well, saying he failed to see what laws the new policy had violated. He gave the petitioners a chance for a fourth complaint. This time, only Protection of the Educational Rights of Kids chose to remain in the fight.

The fourth version asked the judge for a far more sweeping ruling, to "declare that students may not be discriminated against, excluded, disenrolled, suspended, expelled, or removed from in-person schooling or in-person services or benefits on the false basis of the student having an infectious disease."

But Beckloff ruled Wednesday that the suit wasn't even close to being ripe, and there was no imminent harm to children that would be avoided by doing as the petitioners had asked.

"The petitioner is concerned that LAUSD might, in the future, based on some public health emergency, might make some resolution," Beckloff said. "That hasn’t happened. There is no concrete dispute here. And there is no harm if the court doesn’t address this now."

"I do hear what the court is saying," Protection of the Educational Rights of Kids attorney Breyon Davis said carefully. "There are other [Covid strains] coming out, other pandemic-related issues. We know what they intend to do in the future."

But the judge called that "pure speculation," and dismissed the suit with prejudice, meaning the organization won't be allowed to refile its complaint for a fifth time.

LA Unified School District's lawyer said little throughout the hearing.

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