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Parents Fight Changes in Special Ed
L.A. Unified: The effort to place children in regular
classes meets stiff resistance. District hopes to cut its
spending on private schools, agencies.
by David Pierson, L.A. Times, September 16, 2002
For more articles on disabilities and special ed visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
An effort by the Los Angeles Unified School District to offer
special education services at public schools rather than pay
for care at more costly private schools and agencies has
helped trigger a wave of litigation, primarily from parents in
West Los Angeles and the west San Fernando Valley.
A growing contingent of parents is dissatisfied with the shift
toward in-house services, an approach advocated by Roy Romer
shortly after he was named district superintendent two years
ago. Partly as a result, Romer said, the number of requests
for special legal hearings to resolve disputes has doubled
since 1999 to nearly 1,000 annually.
The district is legally obligated to tailor an education plan
to each of its 86,000 special education students who have
disabilities ranging from traumatic brain injury to auditory
processing difficulties. When a parent and the district
disagree over a plan, either can request mediation or a
hearing before a state officer to settle disputes.
Some parents and attorneys say school officials purposely are
denying services to cut costs, knowing that few parents have
the resources to hire an attorney to challenge the district.
"The public system doesn't have the tools, the trained staff
or the capabilities to serve these kids," said Raja Marhaba, a
Granada Hills parent who has recently hired a lawyer to attain
private services for her two children. "There are kids falling
through the cracks."
The district now spends about $145 million a year on outside
contractors and private schools for special education services
that are unavailable in district schools. That's more than
double the amount paid in 1997. The costs are worrisome to a
cash-strapped district that earlier this year scrambled to
make cuts--even increasing class size in some grades--to avert
a budget shortfall.
District officials say they will soon be able to provide
better special education services within public schools at a
far lower cost. Moreover, they say, a federal consent decree
requires that the district accommodate more special education
students in regular classrooms; a massive initiative is
already planned to move students out of special centers and
into the mainstream.
Romer said some parents misinterpret the district's obligation
to provide a "free and appropriate public education" under
federal law to mean they can garner all the services for their
children that they see fit.
"We can't allow a system to develop where there's a cottage
industry of suing the district," Romer said.
One reason for the rise in the number of hearings is that
under Romer the district has limited referrals to private
schools that aren't under district contract.
Andrea Lorant said that policy leaves her in a bind. What the
district is offering her son is "free and public," she said,
"but it's not appropriate."
She said her 14-year-old son, David, who suffers from
Tourette's syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
and obsessive-compulsive disorder, was given a new lease on
life when he was admitted, at district expense, to a private
academy in Sherman Oaks three years ago. There, he made new
friends and got straight A's one semester.
At that time, Lorant said, the district agreed during
mediation that it couldn't provide services that David needed
in its public schools. In May, however, the district notified
her that it could serve David in-house, offering him a
placement at El Camino Real High School, a public school in
Woodland Hills. It no longer wanted to reimburse the $18,000 a
year tuition for the private school, but was offering extra
help with schoolwork, sessions with a counselor and a special
P.E. program.
She refused the offer and now faces a hearing Sept. 26.
"If I put him at El Camino, he would be in classes with 34 to
38 students as opposed to five to eight like he is now,"
Lorant said. "He really struggles socially. It would be a huge
challenge for him."
Mainstreaming Students
Many parents favor mainstreaming their disabled children in
regular public schools, but they say the district first needs
more one-on-one therapists, classroom aides and smaller
classroom sizes. District officials say L.A. Unified suffers
from a national shortage of speech and language therapists,
which has contributed to the rise in requests for hearings.
The district has no comprehensive record of how much money is
spent on such special education litigation. But a
disproportionate number of disputes appear to arise in L.A.
Unified compared with other districts in California, according
to data kept by the California Special Education Hearing
Office.
The district enrolls 13% of the state's disabled children, but
accounted for 34% of all hearing requests in California last
year. The greatest leap occurred in the 2000-01 school year,
when the district garnered 37% of the requests statewide
compared with 23% the previous year, when there was no private
school policy.
More than half of the requests in L.A. Unified come from the
more affluent areas of West L.A. and the West Valley. The
three subdistricts covering those areas (districts A, C, and
D) account for 23% of L.A. Unified's special education
population, but accounted for 62% of the district's 934
hearing requests in the 2000-01 school year.
Parents' Demands
District officials complain that heavy demand for services
from these parents takes services away from poorer parts of
the city.
"These [low-income] parents don't know their rights," said
Regina Davis, a Title I coordinator at Budlong Avenue
Elementary School in South Los Angeles. "We get parents from
Mexico and they don't have a clue. Some of them can't even
read their own language. They need advocates."
Carol Graham, a Santa Monica lawyer who has been representing
disabled children in the district for six years, said the
inequity was not surprising.
"On the Westside, the parents are more educated and they're
willing to fight," she said. "Parents elsewhere don't realize
there are lawyers who will take no retainer [fee]. I charge
very little or nothing because when we prevail, the school
district pays us."
Experts say the litigation in Los Angeles Unified stems in
part from ambiguities in the federal law.
The sticking point is how to define "appropriate" education
for special education students. A 1996 federal court ruling on
what level of services a public school district should provide
said it doesn't need to be a "Cadillac." Instead, public
schooling should be the equivalent of a "Chevrolet," the court
said.
But school officials--and even some parents' attorneys--say
that L.A. Unified in the past sometimes gave parents
"Cadillac" services. Now the district is trying to correct
what it sees as a costly imbalance.
"You're not going to get more than an equitable education,"
said Donnalyn Jaque-Anton, assistant superintendent for
special education in L.A. Unified. "It's not about can I make
you more eligible than others for Harvard."
Such parents as Elyse Wagner of Valley Village scoff at the
district's reasoning. Wagner is sometimes moved to tears when
she talks about her bureaucratic wrangling with the district.
She has spent the last 18 months trying to get vision therapy
for her 13-year-old autistic son Michael, who has been in
special education since third grade because he has trouble
processing information he reads.
The district suggested she send her son to one of three
agencies that contracts with the district for help, but she
says the district declined to pay for the services, and the
only appointments the contractors had conflicted with
Michael's school schedule. Wagner says she will have to seek a
hearing to get what her son needs.
"We have had nothing but fabulous relations with the district
until we hit this one issue," she said. "Rather than spend
money on children, the district would rather spend money on
lawyers."
L.A. Unified is not alone in grappling with the rising costs
of special education. Prompted by the growing demands of savvy
parents, shortfalls in federal funding and rising enrollments,
many school districts in the country have taken steps in
recent years to make special education more effective and
efficient.
Over the last two years, New York City's public school system
has reduced the number of students in special education
programs, reasoning that many were referred there because they
weren't being taught appropriately in regular classrooms. The
number of special education students fell from 160,000 to
120,000, special education funding was capped and more money
was directed toward general education.
A spokeswoman for the school system said litigation has not
increased, because the schools added services to ease the
transition of students into regular classes.
Legal Costs Soar
In Los Angeles Unified, the swelling ranks of special
education students have sent overall costs soaring and
probably contributed to rising litigation as well. Today, the
district spends $1.2 billion on special education, or 13% of
its overall budget of $9 billion. Seven years ago, half the
students were enrolled and it cost half as much.
The federal government has not helped as much as expected. It
had pledged to pay 40% of a school district's special
education costs when the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act was enacted in 1975, but it never allocated the
necessary funding.
This is especially problematic in districts with huge
enrollments, like L.A. Unified. Last year, the federal
government provided 6% of L.A. Unified's special education
budget, or $57 million, but it covers an average of 17% of
special education costs nationwide.
The increase in litigation, in itself, is costly to the
district. Most cases are settled before the hearing officer
can make a ruling, but the district often must pay opposing
attorney's fees. These fees alone climbed from $547,000 in the
2000-01 school year, to $1.2 million last year.
In addition, the costs for the district's own attorneys--both
in-house and outside lawyers--exceeded $1.5 million last year,
said Harold Kwalwasser, general counsel for L.A. Unified.
Adversarial Approach
Opposing attorneys say the district has made matters worse by
taking a more adversarial approach over the last two years. It
has doubled in-house special education lawyers from three to
six and has plans to hire two more. It also has recently
increased from one to five the number of outside law firms
contracted to litigate special education disputes.
"L.A. Unified used to bend over backward to try and resolve
things," said Graham, the Santa Monica lawyer. "But now it's
like a pendulum that has swung the exact opposite way ... I
think it has gone too far."
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