A North Vancouver father will have his day in the highest court of the land on Thursday.
Rick Moore and his lawyer will appear before the Supreme Court of Canada to argue that the North Vancouver school district discriminated against his dyslexic son Jeffrey by not doing enough to help him when Jeffrey was an elementary school student.
The hearing this week marks the culmination of a 14-year legal battle between Moore and the school district.
It began when Jeff Moore struggled with dyslexia as an elementary school student at North Vancouver's Braemar elementary. At the time, the North Vancouver school district had recently closed a special program that previously offered intensive remediation to students with learning disabilities.
Eventually his parents pulled him out of the public system and paid for a private school that specializes in helping students like Jeff.
But Rick Moore felt it wasn't right that students with disabilities should have to pay to get an education.
He won a victory from the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in 2005 that concluded his son had been discriminated against on the basis of his disability.
But the province appealed, and a later B.C. Supreme Court ruling reversed the decision, concluding that neither the local school nor the provincial Ministry of Education could be faulted for the way they tried to help Moore when he was a student in the early 1990s.
The B.C. Court of Appeal later upheld that decision, with two of the three justices concluding the school district had taken reasonable steps to address Moore's needs. Those judges said efforts to help Moore "cannot be measured against a standard of perfection."
The dissenting judge, Justice Ann Rowles, didn't agree, writing that the school district should have done more.
This week, the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada will consider the case.
jseyd@nsnews.com
