A.N.A. Breckinridge County Board of Education

A.N.A. (plaintiff) and a class of students filed a lawsuit against the Breckinridge County Board of Education (the board) (defendant). The lawsuit challenged the lawfulness of a local public middle school’s program that allowed all students to choose whether they wanted to be educated in a class with the same sex or in a coeducational classroom. The board moved for the dismissal of A.N.A. and the other class representatives for lack of standing. A.N.A. attempted to show an actual injury by arguing that all of the middle school’s students were injured by having to attend a school that practiced sex discrimination by offering a program that enabled boys and girls to attend single-sex classes. However, A.N.A. did not offer any facts to show that the students had suffered harm to a legally protected interest that was concrete and particularized because of the option to attend single-sex classes. Unlike the case with educating public school students by race, which the Supreme Court had ruled inherently harmful, there was no prior ruling that supported the notion that giving children an option to be educated in a single-sex environment was per se injurious or unconstitutional. Prior Supreme Court cases had held that excluding students from an educational program based on sex without sufficient justification, such as not allowing female students to attend a state-funded men-only military academy or not allowing men to attend a publicly funded nursing school, violated a legally protected interest. Although A.N.A. and the class representatives alleged such exclusion and discrimination because boys could not attend the all-girls classes and girls could not attend the all-boys classes, the record indicated that all students were permitted to attend coeducational classes.