Tara Gregory has spent more than two decades working at a daycare.

But earlier this year, after new state rules went into effect, Gregory was notified that the Department of Early Education and Care was permanently disqualifying her from working in childcare, based on the results of a background check. There was no way for her to appeal the ruling.

The reason was a juvenile delinquency adjudication from a fight she got into with a group of girls when she was 16.

Gregory, 49, is filing a class action lawsuit challenging the state’s new laws that impose stricter background check qualifications on childcare workers.

“I love working with children and I have devoted my entire professional life to childcare,” Gregory said in a statement distributed by her lawyers, Lawyers for Civil Rights and Lichten & Liss-Riordan. “I never imagined that my whole career could be taken from me because of something that happened when I was a sixteen-year-old.”

Colleen Quinn, a spokeswoman for the Department of Early Education and Care, said the department does not comment on any pending litigation.

According to the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Suffolk Superior Court, Gregory is a black woman who lives in Boston and has worked at New Beginnings Academy, a daycare in Hyde Park, since 1996. She drove a van that picked up and dropped off children, answered phones, performed administrative work and cared for children. She has never been disciplined, and parents have never complained about her job performance.

Background checks and fingerprinting performed by the Department of Early Education and Care never turned up any problems until 2019.

In 2018, the department implemented new background check rules. Partly, the rules were intended to bring the state into compliance with a new federal law that requires states to automatically disqualify someone from working in early childhood education if they were convicted of certain felonies. However, the state rules go beyond the federal requirement by also issuing a mandatory disqualification to anyone who was adjudicated delinquent for certain crimes as a juvenile.

(The Boston Globe reported in February that the new rules also let the department request information and make an individualized determination regarding virtually any past criminal offense.)

One of the offenses that results in a mandatory disqualification is assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.

In 1986, Gregory, then 16, got into a fight with a group of girls and pleaded delinquent to a charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. The “weapon” was her shoe. She received a two-year suspended sentence and spent two years on probation. Her case was terminated around the time she turned 18.

On April 2, 2019, as the result of a routine background check, Gregory received a notice that she would no longer be allowed to work with children, and New Beginnings Academy had to fire her within 14 days. The notice was based on her juvenile case.

The lawsuit is filed as a class action suit seeking to represent the “hundreds if not thousands” of childcare workers in Massachusetts who the suit says will be permanently barred from working in childcare based on juvenile convictions, without any individualized review of their qualifications.

The lawsuit also alleges that the policy is racially discriminatory because of the “disproportionate prosecution and adjudication of minority individuals in juvenile courts.”

The suit claims that the department’s new policy deprives these childcare workers of due process and equal protection under the law and constitutes employment discrimination.

Gregory is asking a judge to overturn the department’s policy of permanently disqualifying workers from employment in childcare based on juvenile adjudications.

Sophia Hall, supervising attorney at Lawyers for Civil Rights who is representing Gregory, said, “The idea that a regulation can unilaterally stop a person from working in their chosen field for the rest of their life in any space in the commonwealth without any right of appeal, it’s just fundamentally unconstitutional.”

In addition, Hall said the regulation contradicts public statements state policymakers made when they passed last year’s criminal justice reform bill, which focuses on giving offenders second chances, particularly if they made mistakes as a juvenile.

“It’s very contradictory to how the commonwealth typically thinks about juvenile adjudications,” Hall said. “We are a commonwealth that has publicly made statements about how we don’t want to have that be a crutch for people’s entire lives.”