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Kentucky Case Spotlights Problem of Untrained Law Enforcement Disciplining Students with Disabilities
A deputy sheriff shackled two elementary school children who have disabilities, causing them pain and trauma, according to a federal lawsuit filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Children's Law Center, and Dinsmore & Shohl.
COVINGTON, Ky.
A deputy sheriff shackled two elementary school children who have disabilities, causing them pain and trauma, according to a federal lawsuit filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Children's Law Center, and Dinsmore & Shohl.
The children, an 8-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl, were so small that the school resource officer, Kenton County Deputy Sheriff Kevin Sumner in Covington, Kentucky, locked the handcuffs around the children's biceps and forced their hands behind their backs, the lawsuit charges. A disturbing video shows the boy, S.R., being shackled and crying out in pain. S.R. has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a history of trauma.
The girl, L.G., was twice handcuffed behind her back by her biceps, also causing her pain. L.G. has ADHD and other special needs. Both children were being punished for behavior related to their disabilities. Neither was arrested nor charged with any criminal conduct. The lawsuit was filed on their behalf.
"Shackling children is not okay. It is traumatizing, and in this case it is also illegal," said Susan Mizner, disability counsel for the ACLU. "Using law enforcement to discipline students with disabilities only serves to traumatize children. It makes behavioral issues worse and interferes with the school's role in developing appropriate educational and behavioral plans for them."
Nationally, students with disabilities make up 12 percent of the student population, but are 75 percent of the students who are physically restrained by adults in their schools, according to the U.S. Department of Education. These disciplinary practices also feed into the "school-to-prison pipeline," where children are funneled out of public schools and into the criminal justice system. Many of these children have disabilities, yet instead of receiving necessary educational and counseling services, they are often punished and pushed out.
Students of color and students with disabilities are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline. One child in this case is Latino, and the other is African-American.
In addition to Sumner, the lawsuit names Kenton County Sheriff Chuck Korzenborn, alleging his failure to adequately train and supervise Sumner, a school resource officer for several public elementary schools in Covington. The complaint further claims that the Kenton County Sheriff's Office violated the Americans with Disabilities Act based on its treatment of the children.
"Kentucky's school personnel are prohibited from using restraints, especially mechanical restraints, to punish children or as a way to force behavior compliance," said Kim Tandy, executive director of the Children's Law Center. "These regulations include school resource officers. These are not situations where law enforcement action was necessary."
In both cases, Sumner was the school resource officer who handcuffed the children. The lawsuit seeks an order requiring a change in policies by the Kenton County Sheriff's Office, and additional training for school resource officers in dealing with young children and children with special needs. It also seeks an unspecified amount of monetary damages against Sumner.
"It is heartbreaking to watch my little boy suffer because of this experience," said S.R.'s mother, T.R. "It's hard for him to sleep, he has anxiety, and he is scared of seeing the officer in the school. School should be a safe place for children. It should be a place they look forward to going to. Instead, this has turned into a continuing nightmare for my son."
The groups say that law enforcement in schools must be trained on how to work with children with disabilities and trauma. Learning de-escalation skills should be as common as fire drills for schools and any law enforcement officers who serve them.
"There was no public safety threat in any of these instances that warranted throwing the regulations out the window and handcuffing these children," said Kenyon Meyer, an attorney with Dinsmore & Shohl. "The school resource officer's involvement was harmful and unnecessary, and it escalated rather than helped the situations. We should expect that if school resource officers are in our school systems, their roles should be focused on safety and security, not discipline or punishment of special needs children."
The complaint, S.R. v. Kenton County Sheriff's Office, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
Watch the video: https://www.aclu.org/video/third-grader-handcuffed-behavior-related-adhd
The complaint is at: https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/sr-v-kcsd-complaint
This press statement is at: https://www.aclu.org/news/federal-lawsuit-targets-shackling-children-dis...
More information about this case is at: https://www.aclu.org/cases/sr-v-kenton-county-sheriffs-office
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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Trump Attack on Trans Athletes Continues as DOJ Sues Minnesota Education Department
"It is astonishing that any president would try to target, shame, and harass children just trying to be themselves, let alone a president with so many actual problems to address," said the state attorney general.
Mar 30, 2026
The US Department of Justice on Monday continued President Donald Trump's crusade against transgender youth competing in sports in line with their identity by suing the Minnesota Department of Education and the state's high school league.
"The United States files this action to stop Minnesota's unapologetic sex discrimination against female student athletes," says the complaint, filed in a federal court in the state by the DOJ's Civil Rights Division.
"The state of Minnesota, through its Department of Education, and the Minnesota State High School League require girls to compete against boys in athletic competitions that are designated exclusively for girls and share intimate spaces, such as multiperson locker rooms and bathrooms, with boys," the complaint continues. "This unfair, intentionally discriminatory practice violates the very core of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972."
The Associated Press noted that "the administration has filed similar lawsuits against Maine and California, and has threatened the federal funding of some universities over transgender athletes, including San José State in California and the University of Pennsylvania."
Tim Leighton, a spokesperson for the league, told the AP that it does not comment on threatened or pending lawsuits. According to The New York Times, Emily Buss, a spokesperson for the state department, said Minnesota's leadership was reviewing the complaint while remaining "committed to ensuring every child—regardless of background, ZIP code, or ability—has access to a world-class education."
While Trump and his allies have aimed to stop all trans women and girls from competing as they identify—including at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles—the fight with Minnesota specifically traces back to the president's February 2025 executive order, after which the administration began investigating the state.
The Minnesota Department of Education gets over $3 billion in federal funding. Democratic state Attorney General Keith Ellison sued to stop the administration from pulling that money last April. In September, the US departments of Education and Health and Human Services concluded that the state agency and league violated Title IX, and the case was referred to the DOJ in January.
In a Monday statement, Ellison said that the DOJ's lawsuit "is just a sad attempt to get attention over something that's already been in litigation for months."
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The DOJ filing about trans student-athletes came less than a week after Ellison and other Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration over its refusal to cooperate with state investigators probing the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents earlier this year, as well as the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who was wounded but survived.
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Critics denounced the top Democrat on the US House Intelligence Committee after he said Monday that he would vote to extend a highly controversial authorization for warrantless government spying sought by President Donald Trump that has been abused hundreds of thousands of times under various administrations.
While acknowledging that many of his Democratic colleagues will vote against reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) because they do not trust Trump to use the provision's sweeping surveillance powers legally, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes (D-Conn.) signaled that he would support renewal and vote against any efforts for privacy protections.
“There’s a lot of people who are going to switch from yes two years ago to no today," Himes told The Hill. "Because even though Donald Trump’s been president for five years, and he has never abused the program—I would know it pretty much in real time if he did—even though that’s true, people don’t trust Donald Trump."
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While Section 702 ostensibly limits warrantless surveillance to non-US citizens, such spying also captures the communications of Americans. The measure has been abused at least hundreds of thousands of times, including to spy on protestors, congressional donors, journalists, and others.
“Donald Trump has shown he will abuse every inch of power we give him," Sean Vitka, executive director of the pro-democracy group Demand Progress, said in a statement Monday. "So you would think that given an opportunity to check his authority and protect Americans, Democrats would jump at the chance."
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Nearly 100 civil society groups including Demand Progress are urging congressional Democrats to "stand firm" and vote against Section 702 reauthorization without reforms, including closing the so-called data broker loophole.
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“I supported it because I felt very comfortable that... additional guardrails were safeguarding Americans’ privacy in a sufficiently significant way as to justify the importance of getting this information on an urgent basis," he told The Hill. "And as a former prosecutor, I know how difficult it can be to get a search warrant, and especially in these cases where there often isn’t even probable cause, but my vote was taken on the expectation that the law would be implemented as written."
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"Right now the US and Israel are realizing 'Greater Israel' by attacking-invading Lebanon and Iran," said one professor. "Hegseth is saying it's Greenland, Cuba, Canada, and Mexico next."
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Alarm mounted Monday over the Trump administration's "Greater North America" plan, a geopolitical blueprint for US imperial hegemony from Greenland to Guyana that's drawing comparisons with a messianic project being pushed by President Donald Trump's far-right allies and war partners in Israel.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth first unveiled the plan earlier this month, telling reporters: "Trump has drawn a new strategic map, from Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal and its surrounding countries. At the Department of War we call this strategic map the Greater North America."
"Why? Because every sovereign nation and territory north of the Equator, from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana, is not part of the 'Global South,'" Hegseth added. "It is our immediate security perimeter in this great neighborhood that we all live in."
Graeme Garrard, a Canadian professor at Cardiff University in Wales, said Monday on social media in response to Hegseth's comments: "By 'Greater North America' he means 'Greater United States. The US is now and has long been a menace and threat to the sovereignty and independence of its hemispheric neighbors."
Numerous observers have compared Trump's "Greater America" with the "Greater Israel" movement, whose most zealous proponents want to conquer everything between the Nile and Euphrates rivers—that is, all of Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan; most of Syria and Kuwait; large parts of Egypt and Iraq; and some of Turkey—for Israel.
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Based on the biblical boundaries of ancient Jewish kingdoms, Greater Israel is rooted in the supremacist supposition that the Abrahamic deity figure God promised the Jews all of the lands between the Nile and Euphrates.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—and other prominent right-wing Israelis support the Greater Israel vision and are working to make it a reality by accelerating the illegal settler colonization and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, preparing to annex the dwindling Palestinian territories, and planning to occupy—perhaps permanently—parts of Syria and Lebanon.
For nearly two centuries, claims of divine favor have also underpinned US expansionism, most famously expressed in Manifest Destiny and mid-19th century plans to annex lands "from the Arctic to the Tropic." This notion drove the US conquest of half of Mexico, as well as later takeovers of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The US also took control over the Panama Canal, which it built at the cost of thousands of laborers' lives, most of them from Barbados and other West Indies isles.
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Nearly 178 years later, Hegseth echoed this supremacist ideology, telling Latin American leaders that the region must remain "Christian nations under God" and stand united in the face of "radical narco-communism."
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