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North Carolina guarantees all children the right to a free public education, including those confined in juvenile detention facilities. For those with disabilities, federal law mandates special education instruction tailored to their needs. 

The Duke Children’s Law Clinic won corrective action for students with disabilities at the Durham County Youth Home (DCYH) after filing a complaint with the state over the suspension of legally required special education services during an extended lockdown. The 36-bed detention facility houses children as young as 10 while their cases go through the juvenile court system.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) found that Durham Public Schools (DPS), which is responsible for education services at the facility, failed to comply with federal regulations. The agency ordered DPS and the youth home to develop policies to ensure the provision of special education services during periods of lockdown, said Clinic Supervising Attorney Peggy Nicholson. 

“This is great news. Students with disabilities have very strong rights and protections around access to education, and if they miss those services, they have a right to compensatory education to make up for services they missed,” Nicholson said. 

“This is a really vulnerable population.”

The accusations 

The complaint alleged that DPS provided the incarcerated children with less than an hour of instruction per day when they would ordinarily receive up to six. 

It was accompanied by a report from Disability Rights North Carolina, an advocacy group that monitored conditions at DCYH in February 2025 during an extended lockdown period. The report says that during that time, DCYH confined residents to their rooms for a reported 22.5 to 24 hours a day. The report says the facility also implemented a near-total suspension of educational services, including special education services, with multiple youths telling advocates they received schooling for “no more than 30 minutes at a time” and only up to an hour a day during the lockdown. 

The clinic’s complaint alleged Youth Home residents with disabilities continued to receive only “minimal, isolated instruction” even after the lockdown ended. That violates state policies as well as the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which mandates a “free appropriate public education” to children with disabilities through an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) customized to their needs. 

While the report doesn’t give a reason for the lockdown, Durham County officials noted in a response that residents’ “out-of-room time” may be limited for safety and security reasons, including inadequate staffing.

The clinic’s advocacy 

Nicholson and student-attorneys Lucy Friedland JD ’26 and Elizabeth Chon JD ’26 filed the complaint jointly with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of North Carolina. It asked DPI to investigate the allegations and order remedies for affected students at DCYH.

“These are kids. And kids are supposed to be in school,” Friedland said. “If you are holding them away from their family and away from school, how are they supposed to become productive members of society?” 

In its decision, DPI noted that students with disabilities who receive educational services through an IEP before entering a detention facility are entitled to keep receiving them. DCYH limited access to the facility during the lockdown and denied requests for access from educational staff, its investigation found. Further, there were no clear procedures regarding when access to students would be limited, or how services would be made up.

Concluding that DPS violated its federal obligation to implement IEPs, DPI ordered the school district to collaborate with staff at Durham County Youth Home to draft procedures that address lockdowns and other circumstances that limit or restrict educational services, and outline how alternative and compensatory services will be delivered.

Nicholson credited the students’ work with helping secure a favorable outcome, particularly given the difficulties of building a complaint alleging systemic rights violations.

"In this project, we were asking the student attorneys to do something completely different and be creative about how they were going to develop legal arguments to really push the Department of Public Instruction to open a systemic complaint, given that we don't have an individual client. 

“I was really impressed with their willingness to think outside the box, to talk to a variety of stakeholders, and to develop a really strong complaint that incorporated all their legal research and investigation efforts. They worked really hard and were amazing.” 

Friedland has a family member with a disability and worked in special education law during her first two summers at Duke Law.  She said it was “extremely satisfying” to see her work acknowledged in a newspaper story about the state investigation, particularly as she heads back to her home state of New Jersey after graduation to work on cases involving juveniles at the Office of the Public Defender. 

“I hope those kids reap the benefits of it,” Friedland said. “But even if the benefit was only knowing there was a person out there who cared about them enough to spend time putting those materials together and signing their name on it, that's good enough for me.”