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January 22, 2002        News Morgue Search  www.feat.org/search/news.asp

EDUCATION

·        Moms Blazing Trails In Adversarial Special-Ed System

·        Commission on Excellence in Special Education

·        Reader’s Posts

 

 

Moms Blazing Trails In Adversarial Special-Ed System

[In the Buffalo News. Thanks to Pauline Sciabarrasi.]

http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20020114/1024006.asp

The founders of FACES - Family Advocacy for Children’s Educational Services - have been battling the educational establishment for nearly five years. And they’ve been winning.

Most recently, they took on the Springville School District and attorney Jerome D. Schad, the special-education specialist for Hodgson Russ, a law firm that represents a large percentage of Erie and Niagara county school districts.

Working with attorney Andrew Cuddy, the two mothers of special-education students helped win a ruling in favor of the family of an 11-year-old autistic and mentally retarded boy, saying he had been denied a free and appropriate education by the district.

Cuddy said the ruling was significant because it may have been the most strongly worded one ever applied to an area school. The district was found wanting for allowing the boy to miss three months of school while it came up with an educational plan for him, and then for allowing the plan to be ignored by the teaching service it contracted with.

And the case isn’t the first loss in Springville. Before they started working with Cuddy, Barr and Shepard won rulings in three straight hearings against the Springville school district.

Barr and Shepard have also argued cases involving children in Niagara Falls, Gowanda and the Kenmore-Tonawanda districts. In a majority of cases, they’ve won their claims outright, and in every case they’ve received more services for the children involved than the districts were offering, Shepard says.

The team is an unlikely one - with Shepard from Barker and Barr from Springville. But both have had their disagreements about how their home districts handled their own children’s special-education needs through the years. In Shephard’s case - the most public - she was convicted of trespassing after a dispute with a counselor over her son’s education.

They both started helping other families in special-education disputes, even founding their own groups, before they met and decided to work together.

Now, through FACES, Barr and Shepard have worked with more than 150 families in 40 school districts across Western New York.

Most of the situations don’t involve litigation. Instead, the women go to Committee on Special Education meetings with parents or make calls on behalf of children.

The women say their strategy is simple: They ask that children receive what they are entitled to by law. The rulings, Barr said, essentially gave the parents the educational programs they had originally requested for their children.

“We want to hold them accountable,” said Barr. “That the children get the services that they’re entitled to, and that I pay for as a taxpayer. And (hearings) happen to be the only way we can do this at this point.”

Their efforts have earned undying loyalty from the families whose cases they’ve accepted.

“When we walk in the school, they listen to her,” said Denise Bouchard of Gowanda, the mother of two boys with autism. “They value the parent, where before they were just nothing to them. I do not go to any (special-education) meeting without Sheila by me.”

But the women have earned the enmity of school officials, who accuse them of pushing up school taxes in pursuit of their cause.

“This is my 17^th year as a superintendent, and I didn’t have a single hearing until I came here,” said Springville Superintendent Thomas Markle, who has headed the district since 1997.

“I’m convinced I have some advocates who have shouldered the flag, if you would, to pursue their agenda. I’m very concerned the system is giving these particular advocates a bully pulpit, and they’re exerting considerable influence on a couple of districts in Western New York. They’d love it to be the cause celebre so they can gain notoriety.”

Schad said the hearings allow the advocates to put an unfair burden on school districts.

“The rise in due process hearings is exclusively due to parents who file such requests and the advocates and attorneys who represent them,” Schad said. “School districts have no control over these filings. Each hearing request triggers very time-consuming burdens on public school professionals and heavy financial burdens on public school budgets.”

Districts pay for the hearings and, if they lose, often have to pay for the family’s attorney fees as well. A single case can easily go over $100,000, and Springville has had many.

Part of the problem may be the system, said Andrew Freedman, an attorney with Norton, Radin, Hoover & Freedman who represents several schools in Western New York and occasionally represents families in other districts.

Supreme Court rulings have shown districts have to supply an “appropriate” education, not an “optimal” education, Freedman said.

“What parent doesn’t want the best for their child?” Freedman said.

“That automatically sets up an adversarial relationship with parents.”

Here is how the system works: a school district’s Committee on Special Education (CSE) must devise an individual educational plan (IEP) for each student under its umbrella. If the committee and parents can’t agree on a plan, then the case is taken to a due process hearing with an impartial hearing officer.

Schad contends the system needs to be reformed by creating “checks and balances to control and hold accountable those very few individuals who abuse the process” and ensure “public education dollars, intended for regular and special-education students, are applied towards actually educating those students and not spent on due process hearings, related litigation, and settlements with misdirected, and sometimes very hostile, litigants.”

In the hearings, it isn’t necessary to be an attorney to plead a case to the hearing officer, although lawyers are usually involved. That’s when legal bills begin to pile up.

Barr and Shepard are believed to be among the few nonlawyers to try the cases.

They started handling cases for free because there were few attorneys available - or affordable. Since they started working with Cuddy, they’ve worked on hearings with him.

Cuddy is a newcomer to the field, going into education law after he represented one of Shepard’s clients last year. He’s a rarity, one of a small corps of education lawyers.

It is tremendously expensive to take a case to a hearing. Shepherd says attorney fees in a case involving her own children in Barker have exceeded $100,000.

“I find it surprising there aren’t more lawyers doing it because of the need,” said Cuddy. “Since I started, I can’t believe the volume of work that’s available. But I think part of the problem is that districts have played such hardball it’s discouraged some lawyers from playing on the side of the parents.”

“The districts” can be read to mean Hodgson Russ because of the number of districts they represent. Barr and Shepard contend Hodgson Russ’ Schad would rather litigate than negotiate.

Meanwhile, Barr and Shepard say the bottom line isn’t the dollar, but the children’s education.

“If they work with the parent and do what they need to do,” said Barr, “the litigation goes away.”

 

 

 

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Commission on Excellence in Special Education

[Excellence in special education?  Now there’s a concept. Thanks to

causeonline.com.]

http://www.ed.gov/inits/commissionsboards/whspecialeducation/index.html

“President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education Holds First

Meeting, Sets Meeting Schedule”

The President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education was sworn in January 15, and set out its agenda for the next four months.

U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige delivered welcoming remarks and swore in the 19-member commission.

“He is committed to the bold proposition that every child can learn,” Paige told the commission. “This doesn’t mean that, after you siphon off the children who have disabilities; or the children who were never properly taught how to read; or the children who never learned English; or the children who disrupted their classrooms, most of the rest of them can learn.

“It means that all of our kids, even the ones our system calls ‘hard to teach’ can learn. This means that even students with disabilities can learn to high standards.”

Paige also called on the commission to discover what works to improve the performance of students with disabilities.

“Your task as a commission is to discover what works to improve the performance of students with disabilities receiving special education,” he said. “Talk to other experts. Examine research. Study preventive reading programs, and tell us how Washington can help state and local communities provide excellent special education services.”

President Bush created the commission in October to collect information and study issues related to federal, state and local special education programs with the goal of recommending policies for improving the educational performance of students with disabilities. The purpose of the meetings is to hear from experts and members of the public who will provide the commission with information and guidance.

The commission is charged with producing a final report to the president by this summer that contains findings and recommendations in the following nine areas:

·        Cost-effectiveness: The effectiveness and cost of special education and the appropriate role of the federal government in special education programming and funding, including an analysis of the factors that have contributed to the growth in costs of special education since the enactment of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (a predecessor of IDEA);

·        Improving Results: How federal resources can best be used to improve educational results for students with disabilities;

·        Research: A special education research agenda;

·        Early Intervention: The impact of providing appropriate early intervention in reading instruction on the referral and identification of children for special education;

·        Funding Formulae: The effect of special education funding on decisions to serve, place, or refer children for special education services and possible alternative funding formulae that might distribute funds to achieve better results and eliminate any current incentives that undermine the goals of ensuring high-quality education for children with disabilities;

·        Teacher Quality and Student Accountability: How the federal government can help states and local education agencies provide a high-quality education to students with disabilities, including the recruitment and retention of qualified personnel and the inclusion of children with disabilities in performance and accountability systems;

·        Regulations and Red Tape: The impact of federal and state statutory, regulatory and administrative requirements on the cost and effectiveness of special education services, and how these requirements support or hinder the educational achievement of students with disabilities;

·        What Models Work in the States: How differences in local education agency size, location, demographics and wealth, and in-state law and practice affect which children are referred to special education and the cost of special education; and

·        Federal v. Local Funding: A review of the experiences of state and local governments in financing special education, and an analysis of whether changes to the federal “supplement not supplant” and “maintenance of effort” requirements are appropriate.

Commission members approved the following meeting schedule: Feb.

25-27, Houston, Texas; March 6, Denver, Colo.; March 13, Des Moines, Iowa;

March 20, San Diego, Calif.; March 21, Los Angeles, Calif.; April 9-10, Miami, Fla.; April 16, New York City, N.Y.; April 18, Nashville, Tenn.; and May 30-31, Washington, D.C. Meeting times and locations will be available at a later date, and additional meetings may be added by the commission, if necessary.

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Reader’s Posts

Looking for full time live-In help for my home, my 16 year old son with

autism and my mother who is 70 years old. Willing to pay $500.00 per wk plus

room & board. We live in a colonial home, outside Boston. Son is in the High

school full time and has supports in the evening & speech therapist. He is

quite independent in his self care. My mother has little mobility in her

legs. She moves and takes care of herself at home. Need someone to do the

house cleaning, washing, ironing, cooking and help with yard work. Also

Does anyone know of a speech path and OT with sensory integration experience

in the Houston area?  We have a 6 year old non-verbal autistic son.  He is

on the GF/CF diet and takes daily supplements.  We would appreciate any

I was looking for information on excessive weight gain in autistic children.

I have 2 children one on whom is in my class who are very large---parents

have been going to nutritionists and getting mris to no avail. Any info out

 

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