SPRINGFIELD - Parents, education advocates and civil rights activists packed a courtroom on Wednesday for a hearing in a class action lawsuit filed by a parent of a teen with mental health issues against the city and the School Department.

S.S et al vs. the City of Springfield focuses on the city's public day schools: three of them which cater to students who are deemed to have mental health issues that discount them from mainstream, neighborhood schools. Lawyers for the plaintiffs argue the children are being warehoused and deprived of basic educational rights.

They filed the lawsuit last year in U.S. District Court and the city has a motion to dismiss pending.

"They're getting less classroom time and also being excluded from a whole host of other activities ... because they're being restrained, suspended and isolated in the classrooms," plaintiffs' lawyer Carole Head told U.S. District Judge Mark G. Mastroianni.

The lawsuit seeks to restructure special education for children with mental illnesses to school-based behavioral services. The lead plaintiff is a now-16-year-old boy who has been diagnosed with depression and ADHD, and filed suit when he was a middle-schooler, who transitioned to a public day high school and then out of school, according to Head. She suggested he was de facto forced from school because he couldn't tolerate the conditions at the day schools.

His mother was in the courtroom on Wednesday, identified only as "Mrs. Y." The plaintiffs filed suit under the Americans with Disabilities Act, umbrella legislation that supports accommodations for people with all manner of disabilities.

Edward Pikula, a lawyer for the city, told Mastroianni that the plaintiffs essentially repurposed a claim after it was rebuffed by a state board of special education appeals. According to Pikula, a judge in that forum ruled that the city had accommodated "S.S" and forged an individual education plan that was "the least restrictive" alternative for the boy. That phrase is key to special education.

"This child has had the opportunity to be in a less restrictive environment and was found to have failed in that environment; so we had a track record," Pikula argued to Mastroianni, adding that the behavior of the plaintiff child was "very disruptive."

"There has been that opportunity and it didn't work; and the judge said it didn't work and we need to move on," he continued.

Pikula argued that, if successful, the class action suit will "open the floodgates" for disgruntled families who want to trump the administrative process the state sets up for special education appeals.

Head argued that is not the case, and the lawsuit is simply about discrimination.

"ADA says you get equal opportunity, not some ... they're different; one is some, one is equal," she told the judge.

She asked that Mastroianni allow the case to advance while Pikula argued that it be thrown out. The judge took the matter under advisement.