Excerpt from: Making Special Education Actually Work (click for full article)
This school year has been particularly challenging for me for a
variety of reasons. I have tons of draft blog posts started and not
finished because I need to interview some people before I can finish
them. Others require additional research that I haven’t had time to do.
I’ll get them out and they’ll be awesome once I do. For now, I just
wanted to update our followers as to what has been happening with
KPS4Parents and ask for your support in whatever forms it may take for
our charitable endeavors.
This post is probably going to seem more like Jack Kerouac wrote it,
but that’s because I’m not controlling for my ADHD tendencies all that
much right now. Frankly, I just don’t have it in me to control for them
at the moment. This is more of a stream of consciousness than what I
usually write, so for those of you who have trouble navigating the
rabbit holes into which I can easily dive, I apologize in advance.
This school year has been characterized for me by
an unprecedented amount of litigation. Until this past June, I hadn’t
been in front of a judge since 2008. Partly, that was by choice because I
really hate litigation. But, mainly it was because I didn’t have to.
School districts were mostly cooperating with me, or at least trying to
even if they had no idea what they were doing.
But, I had several cases that I’d been working on for a long time
that, despite all of the goodwill and seemingly positive attitudes of
all involved, the kids still weren’t benefiting from their programs and
it was clear that all the good intentions on the part of school district
staff were doing nothing more than paving the road to Hell. So, we had
nothing left we could do but file for due process.
Two of them are within the same district and another is in a district
within the same county. All of these cases are in relatively rural
areas where resources are limited and no effort is being made by the
public agencies to develop a richer array of appropriate resources.
At the same time, things started to blow up in a certain school
district in a certain community where one of the attorneys under whom I
paralegal lives. The district in her community recently changed law
firms to a certain firm that was sanctioned by the federal courts in
2005 for “vexatiously multiplying proceedings” and attempting to “stand
special education law on its head.” All of its attorneys (approximately
250 of them state-wide, at the time) were also ordered to participate in
mandatory additional ethics training.
Fast forward 7 years later and here we are going to hearing over
issues that should have settled against attorneys that have absolutely
no interest in the welfare of students and administrators who are more
concerned about losing their positions and getting into trouble than
anything else. As one of the more ethical special ed directors I know
put it, “It’s a sign of the times.”
California has been in so much financial
hot water that people are panicking and cutting off resources for
programs that will ultimately cost everyone more in the long run than
anything we’re saving now. School boards are pressuring administrators
to save money at the expense of serving their districts’ purpose for
existing.
Money is being taken out of the classroom to wage these wars by
administrators being paid six-figure incomes to pay to attorneys with
annual contracts worth tens of thousands of dollars per year, if not
$100K+, depending on the size of the district, very often with hourly
overage charges once they’ve used up the bank of hours in their annual
contracts. The system is set up to financially motivate people like this
to take from our kids to line their own pockets.
People opposed to government spending on social programs seem to be
supporting this as being fiscally conservative public policy, which I
don’t understand at all. There’s nothing fiscally conservative about it.
I think we’re passing through a phase right now, but the students of
California’s public schools are paying the price and this situation is
causing irreparable harm to many of them. So, that’s bumming me out.
Not only am I getting more experience in administrative hearings than
I’d like, because the administrative hearings are run by the State of
California to determine if compensatory education is owed to students of
the State at public expense, these hearings are an abysmal joke. It’s
totally a case of the fox guarding the hen house.
School districts can pretty much get away with anything these days. In the first quarter of FY2012-13,
only 9% of the cases were found by OAH in favor of students and 17% of
the cases were split decisions in which students partially prevailed;
districts prevailed in 74% of the cases.
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