Making Special Education Actually Work

As a non-profit organization, we depend on donations to supplement the minimum monthly payment plans and below-cost billing for our lay advocacy services to families who can’t afford to pay their billing in full each month. In an effort to better communicate the needs that your donations would help address, we are providing below brief synopses of three of the cases we’re working on for which your financial support is needed.

Boy01, Age 8

Boy01′s case first came to us in 2007 when he and his mother moved from one community to another and had difficulties with transferring his IEP due to shortcomings in its language from his former school district. The shortcomings were due to inaccurate and incomplete assessments and the influence of assessor bias that turned out to be the result of a misunderstanding about medical information in Boy01′s file.

We assisted his mother in obtaining IEEs at public expense and payment of private school tuition and transportation by his former district for a period of time to make up for the lost educational benefit from his in-district placement offered by his former district, which had been inappropriate for his needs.

Boy01 is challenged by autism, is largely without language, and still engages in dangerous head-banging behaviors when aggravated or overwhelmed. The head-banging behavior stopped everywhere but in the classroom, requiring us to recently become involved again to help his mother secure programming that would prevent him from injury and replace the head-banging behavior with a more appropriate behavioral outlet.

His current school district had not taken steps to eliminate the behavior prior to his mother pulling us back in despite her efforts to see the problem addressed, though all other aspects of his programming were great.

During the 2009-10 school year, after repeated blows in the same spot on the wall in his classroom, he put a hole in it during a head-banging episode. It was at this point that his mother pulled us back in and we worked with her and his current district to put together a solution.

Boy01′s mother is still making minimum monthly payments towards her open balance from her 2007/2008 case. While we bill at cost in the first place, we also provide sliding scale rates to qualifying families, which means billing out for our time at below-cost. Boy01 and his mother qualify for sliding scale rates in addition to their affordable minimum monthly payment plan.

Because of his demanding special needs, his mother has not been able to consistently work, and now that he is receiving instruction and behavioral intervention at home until the head-banging issue is resolved, this is even more the case. Boy01′s mother is a dedicated parent raising a child challenged by severe autism on her own and doing a commendable job of it at that.

Family’s Outstanding Balance: $1500-$2000 range
Family’s Minimum Monthly Payment Amount: $30

If you would like to make a donation to help cover the costs of our work, please click the donation button below. Your donations will be applied to the costs of helping this child and other children from low-income families.

Boy02, Age 16

Boy02′s case first came to us in 2008. His parents had repeatedly requested that he be assessed by his school district for autism because he presented with autistic-like behaviors. In California, there is no special education eligibility category for autism, per se, because school psychologists are not authorized to render medical diagnoses. Instead, 5 CCR Sec. 3030(g) identifies a category called “autistic-like behaviors” for which he should have been assessed by his district, but was not.

His school district had found him eligible for speech-language impairment (“SLI”) only, although it had known that he had a cognitive impairment for years; it has simply never also found him eligible under what is still referred to as mentally retarded (“MR”) in special education. Actually, MR should have been his primary handicapping condition with SLI as a secondary, one aspect of his case that we ultimately resolved.

It was on the basis of his cognitive impairment that his case carrier with the district, a speech-language pathologist given his eligibility as SLI, refused to write IEP goals that proposed to increase his reading skills. She concluded, not that she was qualified to do so, that he had cognitively plateaued and couldn’t learn anything new and therefore the function of his IEP was to “maintain” the knowledge and skills he’d already acquired.

To top it all off, Boy02′s placement for his 9th grade year was the same middle school special day class he had been in throughout his middle school years, even though students of the district typically go to a high school campus beginning in 9th grade. Boy02 was easily victimized by typical peers and his IEP did not provide for the support and oversight necessary to protect him from bullying and cruel pranks, nor did the IEP team think he had the maturity to handle the high school setting, so the team had agreed for his 9th grade placement to be in the middle school SDC.

However, he was not retained in the 8th grade. He was still a 9th grader. Nonetheless, school site staff referred to him as a “second year 8th grader” and refused to allow him to participate in 8th grade graduation at the end of his 8th grade year along with his 8th grade peers from church and Boy Scouts who also attended his school.

This decision was not made on the basis that he had failed to complete the 8th grade, but the location of his 9th grade special education placement – a placement decision driven by his needs arising from his handicapping condition. In other words, he was denied the opportunity to participate in an age-appropriate school-related activity on the basis of his handicapping condition.

We assisted the family in getting Boy02 referred to and assessed by Diagnostic Center, Southern California, which is operated by the California Department of Education. Politely put, Diagnostic Center disagreed with the district’s conclusions regarding this young man’s learning ability and provided valuable recommendations regarding his learning capacity, learning needs, and instructional strategies to try with him.

Diagnostic Center also concluded that Boy02′s autistic-like behaviors were manifestations of his combined cognitive impairment and speech-language disorder, which looked a lot like autism in some ways but was not actually an autism spectrum disorder. Where the district had refused to assess in this area at all, Diagnostic Center recognized the need to assess in this area of suspected disability to understand the nature of Boy02′s autistic-like behaviors and how to meet the needs that arose from them.

We attempted to work with the district to incorporate the Diagnostic Center findings into his IEP, but the district had no idea what to do with the data … so it did nothing. Before it was all said and done, the district’s lawyer got involved. The district got investigated by the California Department of Education. There were other grievances that were filed.

We ended up translating the Diagnostic Center findings into measurable annual goals, which the district accepted instead of developing any itself (a very uncustomary occurrence). Needless to say, we ended up putting an unusual amount of time into this case and it became apparent fairly quickly that the district was engaging in stall tactics and creating busy work that required us to respond in order to keep the record clear just to run up our bill to the family, presumably in the hopes that the family wouldn’t be able to afford our continued support.

Dirty tricks like this sometimes happen and we’re prepared to deal with them. Rather than continue to bill the family on an hourly basis, we capped the billing at a flat amount. This meant that we were going to put in more hours than we were going to end up billing for, but we couldn’t in good conscience let this wonderful family down.

This is a family of hardworking, religiously devout people who put their kids first. But, they don’t make a lot of money. And, the district knew this. It was trying to take advantage of their limited means to get away with not doing its job.

The situation has now been resolved. Boy02 had made tremendous progress in reading ability and many of the functional and foundational skills that were not taught to him when he was younger. The team at his high school, which is not the same campus he would have otherwise attended and was one of the outcomes that we achieved for him, is spectacular. It’s hard to believe they’re part of the same district.

Boy02 just finished his 10th grade year and his parents couldn’t be happier with the progress he’s made, though they are still debating what to do about the lost years for which he is still due compensatory education. In the meantime, they are still paying down the balance of the capped amount that we agreed to.

Family’s Outstanding Balance: $1500-$2000 range
Family’s Minimum Monthly Payment Amount: $50

If you would like to make a donation to help cover the costs of our work, please click the donation button below. Your donations will be applied to the costs of helping this child and other children from low-income families.

Boy03, Age 17

Boy03′ss case came to us earlier this year and the good news here is that we have a great working relationship with the district’s special education director and autism specialist. Up until the time that we became involved, the parent, a single working mom, had only been working with the school-site personnel and the situation had not been escalated up higher in the district’s administration.

However, upon our request, both the special education director and autism specialist started attending the IEP meetings. On its own, once we became involved, the district brought in an IEP meeting facilitator from its local SELPA to keep the IEP team focused on the proper IEP process.

The difference was night and day. Where Boy03′s IEP process had been stalemated for months since his annual IEP date in Fall 2009, we were able to clear through serious roadblocks, revise components of the IEP that were weak, and add the services of the autism specialist to this student’s program for which she will implement a data-driven program to address his needs.

We still aren’t done. Boy03 was assessed by Diagnostic Center, Central California in 2007 and between then and his April 2010 IEP meeting, he had made little to no progress in his academic skills, which is significant given that his post-secondary goal is to attend college.

And, while the use of an aide has been constructive in reducing his behavioral issues, he’s now aide-dependent due to improper use of the aide as a resource as well as the overall inadequacy if his past IEPs that resulted in the aide being left with unclear direction as to how to appropriately support him.

Moving forward from this point, he is now going to have a structured data-driven program where everybody knows what he/she is supposed to be doing, but that’s an offer of FAPE as of now, not compensatory services to make up for three years of lost educational benefit. There is also data to be collected once the 2010-11 school year begins to inform the IEP team of remaining “unknowns” and the team will then need to reconvene to put the finishing touches on his IEP.

This young man’s mother is an intelligent woman raising a teenager with autism on her own while working a part-time job that doesn’t pay very much. None of the concerns she has raised about her child’s education have been invalid. She just wasn’t getting anywhere trying to resolve them on her own.

We are pleased that the number of hours necessary on this case are not increased by things becoming adversarial with the district. In fact, the district’s director of special education told us that she was relieved that we had become involved.

In spite of the fact that we probably won’t have to put that many more hours into this case, the financial burden of the cost of our services is still a difficult one for this parent to bear, which is why she is on a minimum monthly payment plan as well as sliding scale rates.

Family’s Outstanding Balance: $1500-$2000 range
Family’s Minimum Monthly Payment Amount: $25

If you would like to make a donation to help cover the costs of our work, please click the donation button below. Your donations will be applied to the costs of helping this child and other children from low-income families.

Other Cases

The cases we’ve summarized above are three examples of recent cases we’ve worked on for which your financial support would be appreciated, but we have many more involving children of all ages and both genders with a wide range of handicapping conditions and unique family circumstances.

Even if only some of our families are on sliding scale rates, most of them are on minimum monthly payment plans, which means that we don’t get paid in full each month for all of the hours we put in.

If you would like to make a donation to help cover the costs of our work, please click the donation button below. Your donations will be applied to the costs of helping children from low-income families.

And, THANK YOU for your support of our efforts to improve student outcomes for all children with disabilities.