Making Special Education Actually Work

Connecticut special education attorney, Jennifer Laviano, posted some excellent content on her blog, titled, “Unseemly IEP Team Members,” in an effort to educate parents about some of the negative types of personalities they can encounter from their local school districts at IEP meetings. As Ms. Laviano states in her post, these descriptions do not account for all district personnel; just those who engage in inappropriate conduct.

Even though the personalities she describes only account for a handful of “bad guys,” the non-compliant and/or substantively inappropriate actions of one district employee is often enough to derail the best efforts being made by the ethical district members of the team. To make things worse, most parents don’t know enough about the science or the law of special education to always know when they’re getting shafted. This makes it important for parents to educate themselves.

I want to focus on three particular personality types that Ms. Laviano describes in her posting because I’ve encountered individuals such as these relatively recently and have had to deal with each in a particular manner. One thing to note is that it is possible for a single individual to fit more than one of these negative personality types.
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This posting may seem belated but that’s only because it is. I’ve been buried alive under casework since the beginning of the school year and am just now coming up for a little bit of air. This material has been sitting in my inbox since October 2011 but it’s important and maybe the delays I’ve experienced are a good thing because posting on this now will help keep the issue alive.

The matter involves a systemic issue that impacted a number of children and is a powerful lesson for any school districts that are engaging in the same inappropriate behavior. The case involves a compliance complaint that was filed against Fox C-6 School District in Missouri by a locally-headquartered advocacy organization, The International Coalition for Autism and All Abilities (ICAA). The complaint alleges that the District systemically denied a FAPE to certain special education students whose classrooms were in specific buildings by shortening their school day in order to accommodate transportation schedules.

While matters of FAPE are not things tried through compliance complaints, procedural violations of the law are the purview of compliance investigations and the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MODESE) acted on the complaint on that basis. The federal regulations permit for a student’s school day to be shortened per IEP team agreement and this arrangement must be documented in that student’s IEP. As with any IEP content, the decision to shorten a student’s school day must be based on individual student need, not arbitrary matters like bus schedules.

MODESE found that Fox C-6 was out of compliance with the regulations because some students were missing instruction due to their school days being unlawfully shortened in order to accommodate the District’s transportation schedules rather than because their IEPs called for shortened school days. This finding should serve as fair warning to any other school districts cuttings kids’ lessons short for reasons other than their individual learning needs.

As is often the case, what the complainant knew to be true based on the experiences of the families with which it works and what the investigators found were not identical. Some of this could very well have been a “CYA” move on the part of the District once it received notice that the investigation had been opened, resulting in not all of the allegations being sustained once everything was said and done. Regardless of whether the District attempted to clean up its act before investigators saw anything or not, the fact remains that it still got busted for the violations that MODESE did actually see – and it sent investigators to make on-site observations as to when kids were getting out of school and getting on their buses.

ICAA issued a graceful formal written response to the investigation findings, which maintained its stance that other violations had been taking place regardless of whether MODESE found evidence of them or not, but expressed its appreciation for the findings nonetheless. Some improvement is better than none at all  and even if the campuses that managed to dodge the accountability bullet got away with denying a FAPE, the District on the whole did not and we have to presume that all of this resulted in some kind of systemic change within Fox C-6 District for the better.

We thank ICAA for its tireless efforts to protect the educational and civil rights of students with all types of learning needs. And, we congratulate ICAA on achieving improvements in response to its complaint on behalf of so many students in Fox C-6 District.

I just read about the apparently accidental shooting of 8-year-old Amina Bowman at a school in Washington State when a loaded handgun stashed in the backpack of a kid with a reputation for being troubled went off in the classroom. Of course, this is horrible; of course, Amina’s needs are of the highest priority right now. She was reported as being in critical condition at a hospital in Seattle and our prayers are with her and her family.

But, of course, I have questions about the kid with the gun and have to caution everyone against vilifying this kid until we really know what the situation is with him, which could be limited by the degree to which his family is willing to disclose his confidential information to the public and/or which can be permissibly disclosed pursuant to the ongoing juvenile legal proceedings. Of significant concern is the following passage that I’ve quoted from the article linked to above:

The student had recently transferred to the school, Bill Poss, husband of teacher Natalie Poss, told KIRO-TV.

“I don’t know a lot about the kid other than my wife’s been coming home talking about him, and he’s been a real problem in the class, and she’s been very concerned about it,” said Bill Poss.

What the hell was Natalie Poss doing discussing confidential student information with her husband? If she was concerned about her student, her husband was the wrong person for her to complain to about the situation.

I appreciate that spouses share with each other, particularly involving challenging events in their lives for which they need emotional support, but confidential student information is still confidential student information. In the very least, Bill Poss should have kept his mouth shut and not shared the breach of confidentiality with the media.

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