New York City families are suing the nation’s largest school district for failing to help their children who struggle to find the will to attend school. The class-action lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Federal Court Tuesday by the Legal Aid Society and the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, alleges the New York City Department of Education has denied students with severe anxiety, depression and other emotional disabilities — whose conditions cause them to frequently miss classes — their rights to education. “They have no process for identifying students and developing strategies for getting them back into school,” said Susan Horwitz, the supervising attorney of education-related cases at Legal Aid. “Students can’t get an education if they’re not in school. If absences are the result of a disability, it is [the Education Department’s] job to find a way to get them back in.” C.S., a 16-year-old student on the Upper East Side named in the lawsuit by initials to protect her privacy, has avoided the classroom since she was in middle school. She was diagnosed with agoraphobia, clinical depression and social anxiety, according to court documents. “She’s trapped inside her own mind,” said her mom, who’s identified as K.S. in the complaint, “and inside these big emotions that she’s going through. She has a hard time breathing, she has a hard time just thinking and focusing and concentrating. She feels these intense fears that people are either staring at her or making fun of her. “From the way that she explains it to me, she really is just not able to get herself to a point of going out in public and into the schools,” she added. After shifting to remote learning during the height of the pandemic, C.S. enrolled in the district’s homebound instruction program, which provides limited hours of learning each day, the lawsuit says. She tried a few state-approved private schools for students with disabilities like hers, but struggled with attendance and long commute times — until she landed at home again. By fall 2022, her mom thought she had found a solution: A School Without Walls, a public high school in lower Manhattan offering a hybrid schedule. Within a few weeks, however, C.S. started having severe panic attacks and sensory overload from the noise and class sizes of 15 students. She stopped attending in person and fell behind on coursework, and eventually gave up on virtual classes, too. Her mom K.S. pleaded with the school for help. But staff, according to the lawsuit, directed her instead to a private psychiatrist, and offered no strategies or a plan for C.S. to return to school. Her mom quit her job as a peer specialist in the mental health field; C.S. formally returned to homebound instruction last May. school coronavirusJohn Minchillo/APA student receives her school laptop for home study at the Lower East Side Preparatory School in March 2020 in New York. (John Minchillo/AP) Legal Aid alleges the school system’s treatment of C.S. — and three other plaintiffs named in the lawsuit in Queens, the Bronx and elsewhere in Manhattan — is a violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Act and other federal and state laws. Their attorneys said public schools are legally mandated to better identify and evaluate students with emotional disabilities, and develop plans to address the root causes of why they’re missing out on an education. “If this was a student with a physical disability and couldn’t physically get into the building, the DOE would do something about it, right? They don’t say to students who are dyslexic, ‘Figure out how to read, and then come back,'” said Katherine Groot, a staff attorney at Legal Aid. “But that’s what they’re doing here. … We’re finding this is coming up more and more frequently, especially since the pandemic.” According to the latest figures, 35% of all New York City public school students were considered “chronically absent” last school year. While more detailed data is not yet public, the absence rate for the city’s most vulnerable students is typically higher — impacting 46% of children with disabilities during the 2022-23 term. Before the pandemic, about a quarter of local students were regularly missing school each year. Chronic absenteeism is measured by missing at least 10% of school days. Reps for the public school system defended their support services, including school-based mental health professionals who keep tabs on student absences, and special education teams who can specify relevant services on written education plans. In District 75 schools — a specialized program for students with the most severe disabilities — teachers are “encouraged” to visit absent students at home, after a district-wide attendance director was hired in 2023. “We know that this is an issue among our most vulnerable students,” said schools spokeswoman Chyann Tull, “and, as such, we provide instructional supports, paraprofessional services and mental health services based on students’ individual needs.” C.S. returned this fall to A School Without Walls, where she attends morning remote instruction three days per week. By afternoon, she often logs off. The lawsuit alleges she’s not currently receiving counseling services, legally required for her disability as part of her special education plan. “My prayers are definitely that the Department of Education will recognize that, children like my daughter, students like her, that she is capable of getting an education,” K.S. said. “She wants to go to school, but she just needs special supports.”