When a child with disabilities needs an accommodation to access school, her parents can request it. If the accommodation is reasonable, federal and state civil rights laws require the school to provide it. Over the years, countless parents have asked their child’s school to accommodate their child by allowing her to bring her service animal to school. And countless times schools have denied the request as unreasonable. A debate raged about the reasonableness of service-animal requests. No longer, though.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Berardelli v. Allied Services Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine cemented a child’s right to attend school with her service animal, concluding that service-animal requests are reasonable absent unique circumstances.