NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Lawyers for a Louisiana school board have asked a federal judge to throw out a law passed unanimously after a 4th-grade student was suspended for holding a BB gun during an online lesson.

Lawyers for the Jefferson Parish School Board contend that the law enacted last year violates the school board’s right to due process, The Times-Picayune / The New Orleans Advocate reported.

The Ka’Mauri Harrison Act is named after a 4th-grade student from Harvey who was suspended in September.

Harrison’s father and a Grand Isle man whose 11-year-old son, Tomie Brown, was suspended two days earlier in another online BB gun incident filed separate lawsuits against the school board, news outlets have reported.

School system attorneys dispute the families’ claims that the suspensions violated the children’s rights to freedom of expression, to bear arms and due process.

Their motion filed Tuesday challenges provisions making the law retroactive and letting the families get back payments to attorneys who represented them in appealing the suspensions.

State courts have consistently held that laws allowing additional amounts or types of damages cannot be retroactive, the motion said. Doing so is an “immediate threat” to public education money, it said.

The board noted that it already had held appeals for the students, something called for by a second retroactive provision. Harrison’s suspension was reduced from six days to three and Brown’s three-day suspension was upheld at hearings in December.

The motion also challenges state Attorney General Jeff Landry’s request to bring the state into the lawsuit on the families’ behalf.

“Defendants deny that the State’s intervention is proper in this matter,” the motion says. Landry’s arguments “exceed the scope permitted” under federal law, according to the motion.