But We'll Get Sued!

"We can't cut our special education budget any further.  If we do not provide required services to special needs students, we'll be exposing ourselves to litigation."

Have you ever heard a statement like that in a school board meeting or seen it quoted in the paper?  Statements like that should not go unchallenged.  But they do, because the only people who know better are intimately involved in the process, and those are the people who want to spend more.

Let's get a few facts out on the table.  Schools themselves largely decide what a special needs student's specific needs are.  The specific needs are determined by an I.E.P. team consisting of parents, classroom teachers, a special education teacher/case manager, a counselor, an administrator, and maybe the school nurse.  Unless the student has a severe handicap, there's a lot of leeway in what they determine.  While a learning disability may be identified by objective test scores, how it manifests itself in the child's educational performance and what accommodations should be made are left up to the team.  Parents are at a disadvantage in the process because they aren't the education "experts."   

It is very difficult for a parent to sue.  They don't have the resources of VSBIT (Vermont School Boards Insurance Trust), which defends schools against litigation.  What they do have, however, is the burden of proof in showing that the needs were determined incorrectly or the services were not provided according to the needs that were determined.  Who can provide such proof?  The education "experts."

Over the years, I.E.P. teams have developed certain standard accommodations.  Such accomodations include "preferential seating" or "structured study hall" or "word banks on all quizzes and tests."  Two expensive accommodations that have become common are a "shared aide" and an "individual aide."  Also, "taking tests in an alternative environment" is pretty standard, which means resource rooms have to be staffed to receive these students.

Students often have unqualified and unhelpful aides following them around.   And students often get answers fed to them while they take the tests.  (Natually, the aides want to appear successful.)  The result is flatlined achievement scores for special needs students and a huge expenditure of money.    We should not continue to follow this failed model.

In future posts, I will discuss other models which make more sense than the one we've been following.  Stay tuned.

Comments

[G. Cross]

I look forward to reading Curt's suggestions for reducing the cost of special education. Many in Vermont have struggled with this issue for years. Any new ideas will be appreciated by all the districts across the state.

I would, however, urge all who are concerned about these costs to carefully read the 138 page manual recently revised by the Vermont Department of Education titled, "Special Education Regulations and Other Pertinent Regulations, Adopted 9/17/07." It can be found on the DOE's website. This manual includes 11 pages, section 2363, devoted just to the Individualized Education Plan team. It deals with who shall be on the team, how team decisions will be made and much, much more. The manual includes extensive sections on the IEP evaluation process, official notifications, due process procedures and again much, much more.

Finding more effective and less costly alternatives to current practices would be a great help to all parties. Ensuring that any new ideas comply with the recently revised regulations is absolutely essential and is what risk management is all about.

[Curtis Hier]

While the number of pages of regulations sounds impressive, they still leave the key decisions up to IEP teams, which are steered increasingly by special education coordinators.

"The law" is often given as a reason for a special ed. practices, but it's not always the law that is really responsible. For instance, it was largely the will of special educators that led many schools to full inclusion practices. Since then, the pendulum has swung back more to a partial inclusion model as special educators have witnessed the flaws in the full inclusion model.

Also, Vermont schools are using shared aides now more and more and individual aides not so much. Again, that isn't the law guiding that phenomenon. There's lots of leeway in special ed. practices.

[G. Cross]

I recall the movement to "full inclusion" a little differently. Way back in the early 1970s at least two universities here in the East were already preparing teachers for the inclusion model. The two were UVM and George Washington University in DC. However, the big push to implement this model came from parents and advocacy groups. Teachers, both special and regular, had to be drawn into the program, some kicking and screaming. As the director of what was probably the first-in-the-nation, federally funded "integration", what we called in those days, project for both special and regular education teachers, I can assure you that teachers were not "early buyers." This project covered all of Berkshire County in Massachusetts in the mid-1970s era.

I agree that the model has not been totally successful, but suggest that issue is as much the result of the move away from pedagogical training for current and future teachers as it is anything else. The most difficult aspect of teaching is learning how to differentiate instruction in such a way that all children can learn. "A-one-size-fit-all" teaching strategy simply does not work.

I also agree that schools have moved away from the model in recent years. However, again a lot of the push in that direction is also coming from parents and advocacy groups.

To dismiss the influence of parents and advocates on the IEP process, is what often leads to those law suits. It also produces less than effective programs for the students.

[Curtis Hier]

Well, you go back further than I do, so I'll defer to you somewhat. It is true that parent and advocacy groups have had their share of input. What I remember as a young teacher, though, was special educators telling us that full inclusion was the law. Perhaps they'd been pushed around by some parents with unreasonable expectations. Or perhaps they really believed in the cause. But they were wrong. The Holland case (Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, 1994) is considered to be the high water mark of inclusion case law, and it doesn't come anywhere near requiring full inclusion.