Legitimate Parent Advocacy vs. Conspiratorial Movements

As much as the work we do at KPS4Parents focuses on social justice issues that include parents’ legal rights in the special education process and related areas of public agency regulation, I’ve been hesitant until now to say anything about what has been charading as a parents’ advocacy movement, lately. This is mainly because of the most recent developments involving the leadership of one such faux parent advocacy organization, Moms for Liberty, which pretty much speak for themselves and eliminate the need for me to work that hard at supporting my arguments with evidence.

I’m busy. I don’t have time for deep dives into the world of politics when I’m already doing deep dives into the peer-reviewed research and case law during the regular school year. I see every bit of stupidity and ineptitude in local government as we see in Congress on the daily. Idiot politicians are the reason why lay advocates and civil rights attorneys are needed in a democracy. Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then He made school boards.” It’s not like any of this is new.

I’ve got over 20 students on my lay advocacy caseload, at least two of those cases are going to due process, several of those cases have outstanding remedies due to them from a federal investigation of their local school district that have not yet been negotiated, and others are requiring me to work with families at the local agency level to hopefully resolve their concerns, all the while also making the record just in case formal complaints or litigation become unavoidable. I’m not going to stop all of that to write a blog post/podcast episode unless the moment is right, and it’s now right.

I’m won’t rehash the Moms for Liberty scandal, here. You can read up on that on your own time, if you don’t already know about it. What I’m focusing on here are the social and psychological sciences as they interact with the rule of law in our democratic republic, and what that means for this country to have a government that is “of the people, for the people, and by the people” with respect to legitimate parent advocacy.

We’re meant to have a representative government and it isn’t representative of most of “the people” when a tiny minority of whack-job conspiracy theorists and con artists with prefrontal cortices made of cottage cheese or something close to it, are put into positions of authority, or otherwise have influence over those with authority, and have access to taxpayer resources with no effective systems of oversight or accountability. Once in power, people like these then attempt to bend reality to fit their whacko notions of how things should be, regardless of what the majority of their constituents want or need or the actual facts of the situation, usually for their own financial gain and without regard for any harm done to others. Berkeley Breathed referred to such an individual as a “tax-fattened hyena,” in one of his old Bloom County cartoons. I find the term eternally apt.

I find that these are “the people” employed within the public sector who are the most opposed to any kind of data collection that could be used as an audit trail and enforcement tool, which is why the backend business automation of most publicly funded agencies at the local level is such garbage. It’s really hard to misappropriate public funds when you’re leaving digital footprints right back to yourself in the process. Effective office automation on par with what has been happening in the private sector for decades has been limited in the public sector for supposed budgetary reasons, but the reality is that the ROI on a good system would make the upgrade pay for itself in no time. It’s not costs that are being avoided, it’s audit trails.

Because “the people” are expected to hold their government accountable according to the rule of law, it is necessary for “the people” to know how to do so and be given access to public agency information through various client’s rights, freedom of information, and public records laws. Because of our laws regarding public access to public agency information and the mechanisms of accountability that are built into the regulations that describe how our public agencies are supposed to operate, our democracy equips us with powerful tools that allow us to advocate for appropriate outcomes as regular members of society, including as parents for our children in programs for which we pay taxes to serve their needs as a matter of law.

Keeping parents in the dark about their rights and the proper paths for recourse and distracting them with pointless displays of anger and hostility are all parts of a strategy to undermine legitimate parent advocacy, not support it. It drains parents’ energy, time, and resources to pursue legitimate remedies by wasting it all on displays of emotion that rarely change policies and create more problems than they solve. The actual processes and procedures afforded to parents as per their lawful parent rights in the public education setting are the only mechanisms of democracy that are designed to address meritorious parental concerns.

No matter how many fits at a school board meeting a parent may throw, until they file a formal complaint of some kind, there’s not much anyone can do. When parents bring their legitimate concerns to a school board meeting, the proper response is for someone from the school board to help the parent exercise their rights, including helping them file a formal complaint. When parents attempt to argue for things outside the scope of what their public schools can legally do, the schools are obligated to explain how the rules actually apply and what can legitimately be done to address such parental concerns.

In the case of special education, this is specifically regulated at 34 CFR Sec. 300.503, which mandates the provision of Prior Written Notice (PWN) to parents whenever a change to a child’s special education program is proposed or denied by the public education agency. If the public education agency’s explanation doesn’t make sense for why it is proposing changes or refusing changes requested by parents, parents have a right to use whatever cockamamie excuse they’ve been given in their PWNs as evidence against their public education agencies in regulatory complaints or legal proceedings. Our democracy protects parents with rules like these, but knowing how to use them and enforce them isn’t something most parents know how to do.

One of the methods of depriving people of their rights is to deprive them of any knowledge of past successful efforts to secure the rights of citizens, such as with the litigation and legislative history of special education law, and the processes and procedures by which everyday people can now assert their rights under the law because of how past cases were successfully argued and won and how legislators have responded to the relevant scientific and legal developments over time. This is why these organizations are so strongly opposed to any curriculum that accurately describe the effects of slavery on American society and governance, and don’t want to acknowledge the growing body of science that better explains gender and sexual orientation than what the science of the past was able to tell us because it challenges behaviors that have been learned and practiced over generations according to religious and political beliefs that don’t always abide by observable reality.

For example, during the 1600s, the astronomer Galileo died under house arrest for heresy after daring to assert that the Earth rotates around the sun based on his observations using telescopes and calculating the movements of the stars and planets, because this contradicted the Church’s position at that time that the Earth was the center of the Universe and everything in the skies rotated around the Earth. Galileo was right, of course. He witnessed the actuality of God’s miracle, but rather than revel in its realization, the Church rejected it because it contradicted a long-standing myth that was being knowingly perpetuated by the Church so that it was not contradicted in the eyes of the people, lest it lose their trust and obedience. The Church did not acknowledge that Galileo was right and absolve him of heresy until more than 300 years later during the 20th century.

A fact-based discovery that contradicted the Church in such a significant way would have cost the Church a great deal of credibility among its believers if acknowledged as true, or at least that’s what the Church apparently feared, so it tried Galileo for heresy and gave him the choice of being found guilty and thrown in prison for the rest of his life or accepting a plea deal and spending the rest of his life under house arrest. He took the plea deal.

Whether you’re religious or not, the Universe functions according to set rules that can be measured, analyzed, and understood with enough time and resources. There may be a difference of opinion as to why that is and who or what caused it to happen, but what has actually happened with respect to Creation is an observable fact that simply has to be studied in order for the design’s function and purpose to be understood.

For example, humankind just spent seven years flying a space craft to an asteroid that is due to smack into the Earth in about 150 years so that we can start figuring out now a way to prevent it from hitting us by the time it gets here. We just flew this thing over millions of miles of space, right up to this asteroid, punched the asteroid using a mechanical arm, captured chunks of debris and dust that flew up off the surface of the asteroid from getting punched, then flew the debris and dust all the way back to Earth so we can analyze it and figure out what the asteroid is made of, which will help us figure out how to prevent it from hitting us. You cannot tell me that our species is capable of doing that and yet we can’t apply science to improve the quality of life for every human on our planet without destroying the world around us.

I help everyday families of learners with disabilities acquire the necessary knowledge about the processes and procedures that apply to their disability-related needs and rights so they can successfully advocate for their loved ones according to the applicable science and the rule of law. I understand the regulated processes and procedures that give my clients access to what the law promises them. I use the applicable sciences to identify each learner’s unique needs so as to inform the requests I make of publicly funded agencies and programs on their behalf. I understand what it means to facilitate “the people’s” participation in democracy at the local level, including participation in state and federal investigations, as well as due process hearings and disability-related litigation in local, state, and federal courts.

I understand that the only way to uphold democracy is to participate in it according to its rules and regulations. Anything that undermines the democratic process by violating a student’s constitutional rights, down to a shoddy triennial evaluation or a garbage IEP, is fair game for citizens knowledgeable enough to understand what they are looking at and the remedies available to them to fix anything wrong. Keeping people ignorant of what has worked in the past is a deliberate attempt to undermine people’s advocacy for themselves, their loved ones, and their communities in the present. People who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it, thus learning their lessons the hard way from trial-and-error rather than from the example set by those who came before them, which wastes time and slows down the rate at which society becomes smarter.

The first step of preventing people from advocating for themselves is preventing them from knowing about past efforts of advocacy that were successful, hence the book bans, altering curriculum standards to promote misinformation and omit important accurate information, protesting community-based pro-literacy and historical accuracy efforts spearheaded by minority groups, and attempting to control any other literary outlet that could expose children to facts that make these individuals uncomfortable. Keeping people ignorant is a powerful tool of oppression. That’s why American slaves generally weren’t taught to read. A literate oppressed class can communicate and collaborate more effectively to rise up against their oppressors.

People forget that America went through upheavals similar to what we are experiencing right now, back in the 1980s and 90s with some people freaking out over mandatory seat belt and motorcycle helmet laws and “no smoking” laws in restaurants and bars the same way some people freaked out about vaccines and masks during the worst of COVID. Back then, the Cold War had all the doomsayers expecting everyone to die in an unavoidable nuclear holocaust. Tipper Gore was coming for everybody’s rock music lyrics and Larry Flint, who once ran for president on the Republican ticket, was defending his first amendment right to show exploitative photos of consenting models to consenting purchasers of his published works, thereby effectively defending the first amendment rights of all pornography publishers.

Ironically, many of the men who I remember from back then supporting Larry Flint’s first amendment rights have since taken considerable issue with Colin Kaepernick’s first amendment rights when he peacefully protested murderous police violence against people of color and other minorities, as well as racial inequalities in America in general, by silently kneeling during the national anthem before the start of professional football games. Games! Grown men running around in matching outfits chasing balls and each other, like that’s somehow more important that the fact that we have a national epidemic of people on our local police forces terrorizing and murdering certain groups of people at will and getting away with it. It rather makes clear that they were willing to defend democracy when it meant they could look at pictures of sexually exploited models, but when it comes to protesting homicidal abuses of police authority against people of color and other minorities, as well as racial inequality in general, that is “a horse of another color,” which is disgusting.

My point is that the whacko minority has always been around, hypocritically asserting itself when it sees the opportunity to cite the law in support of its own agenda while denying the same protections to others with whom they disagree, before retreating into the corners and staying silent for a while until circumstances provoke them into coming out of the woodwork again. With each periodic re-entry into the mainstream, the whackos, at least temporarily, recruit others to their cause until their actual motives and sheer stupidity become evident to their recruits, who then abandon them as they begin to recede back into the woodwork. It’s a predictable cycle and now people are living long enough to see it repeat in their lifetimes.

When you realize it’s a predictable cycle, each new “Groundhog Day” moment leaves you better prepared for when the cycle repeats itself again. The benefit of learning from history is not having to waste time repeating past mistakes through trial and error to eventually arrive at the same conclusions. It’s Vygotskian scaffolding realness. It allows you to step into the problem-solving at a much later stage in the process, building upon the knowledge that was gathered by those who came before you, instead of starting from the beginning with nothing.

Here’s what I can tell you about having to interact with the crackpots that have infiltrated the public sector or otherwise raise pointless hell that interferes with the legitimate functions of government at the local level, as well as my childhood growing up in the middle of the still butt-hurt losers of the Civil War who have just been waiting for as long as I can remember for Dixie to rise again so they can get a re-do of the Civil War: I’m not kidding when I say their prefrontal cortices are made of cottage cheese, or the neurological equivalent thereto.

I’m entirely willing to believe that this is due to environmental deprivation of developmental learning opportunities throughout childhood and being raised by uneducated, usually deeply religious, authoritarian parents who supported slavery or descended from people who did, remained bitter and deeply chagrined about losing the Civil War, and relied on corporal punishment as their primary parenting method. I don’t think most of them were necessarily born without intact cognitive hardware to begin with. I think an awful lot of perfectly normal humans born into that culture have been deprived of developmentally appropriate environments during childhood that prevented the full development of their brains due to cultural beliefs that strictly controlled their lifestyles and environments.

There is a famous case study of a poor woman named Genie who was grotesquely neglected and abused by her family, and then subsequently exploited by the scientific community to study the effects on her development of spending the first 13 years of her life either strapped to her bed on her back or strapped into a toilet chair, always alone in her room with almost no human interactions. She spent most of the first 13 years of her life alone in that bare room with no toys, no language, and no intellectual stimulation. As a result, her brain failed to develop and she will always be intellectually, communicatively, and physically disabled and require constant care.

There were a lot of ethical concerns around how the research community handled Genie once she was rescued from her family. That said, her situation provided tremendous insight into what can happen to the brain of a developing child when necessary environmental stimuli are not present to trigger the brain to grow and develop. Play is learning, and formal education only adds to the learning that a child is naturally inclined to pursue independently in a developmentally appropriate environment. When children are deprived of developmentally appropriate environmental stimuli, the parts of their brains that are most ripe for learning are given nothing to learn and will atrophy from lack of use.

Genie’s uniquely terrible situation made clear that, once developmental milestones were lost due to environmental deprivations during childhood, they could not be recovered. This has since informed a great deal of science designed to understand how environments that contain some developmentally appropriate stimuli but not others affect human development across the lifespan, starting in childhood. In attempting to understand why the whackos are acting so whacky, it helps to understand that a fair number of them can’t help it.

This is how we’ve come to understand how It is entirely possible for a person to get just enough input from their childhood and adult environments to learn how to do accounting, cook dinner, and fly a plane, but still have failed to developed in other areas necessary to functioning as a fully capable member of society. Intellectually capable people with under-developed social/emotional functioning can pose a danger to themselves or others, particularly with respect to domestic violence and disgruntled employees.

What we are now starting to understand about the effects of children being raised in environmentally deprived environments explains a lot in hindsight, but creates a whole new set of challenges about how to ethically address this as a threat to domestic tranquility going forward. Our current societal problems with mass shootings are strikingly similar to the suicide bombers of the 9/11 era. Radicalization is a lot easier to achieve with people who have “holes” in their development from inborn disabilities and/or being raised in developmentally deprived environments. Parents who were raised as children in developmentally deprived environments are more likely to perpetuate the deprivation with their own children because they don’t know that something is missing, much less what it is, so they don’t know to add it to their children’s environments.

Education that includes developing critical thinking skills, such as those promoted by the Common Core, is necessary to create a public that is educated enough to participate in our government “of the people, for the people, and by the people,” with any success. So, when these groups start coming for our public education system to remove content and control what facts our students are allowed to be taught and which facts will be withheld from them, that’s censorship, not first amendment freedom of speech or evidence-based instruction. It’s entirely unconstitutional, and it violates best practices.

That is not legitimate parent advocacy. That is an organized effort to undermine our democracy by groups of radicals looking to cloak themselves in the language and superficial appearance of a cause people can support – here, parents’ rights in the public schools – so they can infiltrate, undermine, and profit from running our public systems in a broken way. As someone who does the job for real, I resent getting lumped in with these kooks by public education agency officials and their representatives when I attempt to help a family avail itself of the actual rules and regulations as a legitimate function of democracy. I deal with enough “Karens” employed within the public schools; I don’t need to also be associated with the “Karens” high-jacking the legitimate cause of parents’ rights and using it as a dishonest cover to pursue undemocratic ends.

In the special education context, which serves as a good example of the kinds of regulated mechanisms of democracy that exist at the local level, parents have federally protected rights to, 1) informed consent, meaning they fully understand any special education-related documents to which they are asked to sign their consent, and 2) meaningful parent participation in the IEP process, including a voice in educational placement decisions. This means that a parent’s input has to be seriously considered by all the other members of the IEP team, and it’s understood that the parent is automatically a member of the IEP team as a matter of federal law. The public schools are not permitted to unilaterally decide what goes into a student’s IEP without parental input and parents have recourse if they ever disagree with the public schools about what their students with disabilities require.

There are all kinds of rules and regulations that describe how parents of children with disabilities can avail themselves of the rule of law and enforce their children’s educational and civil rights. The problem is that the rules and regulations are complicated, the science that applies to their children’s unique educational needs is complicated, the processes and procedures take way too long for comfort, and there are usually at least some unrecoverable economic costs to the families that take time to pursue appropriate remedies from the public sector for their loved ones with disabilities. It’s not fair to the person with the disabilities when the people responsible for advocating for them, usually family members, know less than the people from whom they must make these requests.

The power imbalance is significant and is only further complicated by the reality that the public sector employees have millions of taxpayer dollars to tap into to pay lawyers to keep them out of trouble. Think: “pre-conviction Michael Cohen.” These are often high-priced fixers paid by tax-fattened would-be oligarchs who view their publicly funded agencies as their own little personal fiefdoms, and their consumers as just a means to their own personal financial ends, as though public program beneficiaries solely exist to justify the publicly funded paychecks of public agency administrators.

Every state has adopted standards by which all of its public schools must abide for the purposes of providing America’s K-12 students with what each state considers appropriate for students to have learned by each grade level across all core subject areas. These whacko book-banning conspiracy theorists and their dog-and-pony road shows at school board meetings, public libraries, and community-based literary events are taking their arguments to the wrong venues if they don’t like what is being taught in their states.

Most of these folks tend to favor the idea of reduced federal government and increased state rights, so I don’t understand what their argument is, here. They have an existing state right to establish their curriculum standards at the state level, and if they don’t like those standards, they can put forth proposed state legislation or a bring a lawsuit against their state that proposes to change their state’s standards, but their local school districts are still responsible for satisfying their state’s then-current standards until such time as they are changed, as a matter of law because this is a democracy, and that’s how you change the rules if you don’t like them in a democracy. If attempts to change the curriculum at the state level fail, one’s recourse could include filing a lawsuit or running for public office to effect policies directly, not book bans and death threats.

This brings me to the actual strategy that is at play here, which is something I call the “Anger & Fear Engine.” This goes to something that most people understand, which is the fight/flight/freeze mechanism. For many years, people only thought of the fight and flight aspects of it, and I suspect that’s because they rhyme and it’s easy to remember, but in all actuality, when an organism is threatened, it will actually either run away, fight to defend itself, or freeze and get either ignored or attacked. Plenty of people know what it’s like to automatically freeze in a moment of surprise, especially if it’s scary. The fight/flight/freeze mechanism is a very primitive neurological response that is normal in human development, and something humans share in common with almost all other living creatures.

Anger is generally a secondary response that puts one on the offensive after something has initially put one on the defensive. One gets mad when made to feel afraid, vulnerable, betrayed, insulted, offended, disrespected, rejected, inferior, etc. All of those things instantly make people feel bad about themselves, at least until they’re done processing what is going on, at which point the fight/flight/freeze mechanism kicks in. Anger occurs along with the adrenaline rush that hits when that “switch” is “flipped” from feeling compromised to going on the offensive.

If you opt for fight, you’ve taken that defensiveness and flipped it to going on the offensive. If you opt to flee or freeze, the problem is likely to remain unresolved, at least temporarily. Sometimes you need to retreat and regroup before you know how to most effectively go on the offensive and fight back. Flight can serve a constructive purpose if it buys you the time to figure out what you need to do and what tools you will need to fight back and win. This is the primary reason why most of my clients do not sign agreement to any important documents when they are presented; we take our time to review them outside of any meetings when we have time to sit and focus on what they actually say before responding to them in writing with any signatures. Freezing may buy time if it doesn’t result in getting attacked; if anything, it can buy time until an opportunity to either fight or retreat presents itself.

Dr. Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Those words entirely capture the amount of time it takes to do a good job of gathering the necessary data and documents to inform an appropriate program of instruction for a student with disabilities, much less engage in any enforcement mechanisms that might also be necessary to make that happen.

British film producer Peter Brook is quoted as saying, “Violence is the ultimate laziness.” His point was that negotiations and adult-level problem-solving require a lot of serious thought that is based on a comprehensive-enough understanding of the underlying facts, which can take a long time, but bashing people over the head can take just a few seconds and you don’t have to think that hard to do it. Violence is lazy because it doesn’t include all the hard thought and collaboration that is required for peace. Have you noticed that the people who do the most complaining rarely have a workable plan to fix whatever they’re complaining about? They exist to grieve, not resolve.

Fear can become anger very quickly, and becoming angry can instill fear in others, which can prompt them to become angry as well, hence the “Anger & Fear Engine.” It’s a common psychological response to threats, but uncontained anger and violence towards societies or specific members of society are the methods of barbarians. They are the methods of the lazy or incapable. Successful strategists can manipulate environmental factors according to best practices and the rule of law such that other people’s behaviors are shaped and changed into something more conducive to a healthy, thriving community without any fighting at all, such as when policies and practices actually meet the needs of the people. Sun Tzu asserted in The Art of War that the most successful war is the war you prevent and never have to fight.

The problem, however, is that the dangerously large minority of people whose prefrontal cortices are something akin to cottage cheese literally lack the neurological hardware to understand how to participate in the adult-level problem-solving necessary to seriously address society’s challenges. Legitimate parent advocacy requires a lot of research and writing according to science and law, not screaming in school board meetings, blocking the entrances of public libraries, or disrupting community-based literacy programs. Any organization that purports to engage in standing up for parents’ rights should be actually participating in activities that involve the actual mechanisms of democracy, or they are just fundraising off the backs of people in need without offering real solutions and telling them the only solutions are harassment and/or violence. They are selling the lazy alternative to people who don’t know how to engage in the real solution.

Moms for Liberty and organizations like it are not legitimate parent advocacy organizations. They do not assist parents in participating in the legitimate democratic processes and procedures that already exist to help parents uphold and enforce their rights. If anything, there is an effort by these groups to obstruct and/or subvert democracy at the local level by passing bigoted, unconstitutional local school board policies and aggressively attempting to uphold and enforce them, even if they are unlawful and unethical. The legitimate complaint and due process mechanisms available to parents are not utilized by groups like these, very often because they would not be successful on their merits for the types of undemocratic culture-war claims they want to assert.

It is so very important for parents to make sure that any outside providers they turn to for support are acting according to best practices and the rule of law, and are legitimately taking the needs of client families into account. Parents should be asking a lot of “how” and “why” questions as they learn how to exercise their rights under the law. The first question any parent should ask when embarking upon an effort to exercise their rights is, “May I please have a copy of my parent rights?” Start there and keep digging for more information if something doesn’t make sense. Call your state’s department of education and ask for explanations of things you don’t understand about the rules and how you can legitimately participate.

If you think your local education agency needs better board leadership, run for school board yourself or support candidates who agree with you about compliance issues that affect your children and local community. The only way to preserve democracy is to participate in it, which means voting, running for office, and availing yourself of complaint and due process procedures as appropriate to each circumstance to create the changes in the world you want to see. Throwing a fit and demanding that everybody else force reality to bend to your will isn’t democracy at all.

OCR Complaint Results in District-wide Compensatory Education

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I’m long overdue to post new content to the KPS4Parents blog, podcast, and social media, but it’s been a busy school year. The continuing fallout from COVID-related school closures that disrupted the educations of most children, and had even more profound effects on our learners with disabilities, has kept me busy.

It’s one of these COVID-related cases that brings me back to the blog and podcast today, because after over two years of waiting for a complaint investigation to get done that was only supposed to take 180 days, the United States Department of Education (USDOE), through its Office for Civil Rights (OCR), finally concluded an investigation of Oxnard Union High School District (OUHSD) and how it handled its students with disabilities during COVID-related school closures. To say I and the student’s family now feel vindicated is an understatement.

You can read OCR’s findings and the resolution agreement that OUHSD entered into with OCR to resolve its violations by clicking here. I’m not going to belabor every little thing in those documents because they speak for themselves and you can read them at your own convenience, but I will summarize them, here. In short, not only did OCR find that the District violated my client’s civil rights, it likely violated the rights of its other students with special needs by refusing, as policy, to provide any in-person disability-related supports and services during campus closures, even if they were necessary in order for the student to access learning.

At the beginning of the pandemic, when the schools were first closed down here in California, the Governor’s office understood immediately that our special needs students were going to be disproportionately affected by the school closures. With the new budget during the summer of 2020, the Governor committed $1B to cover compensatory education costs for students with disabilities who lost educational benefits during the school closures because they couldn’t access the disability-related supports they needed in order to learn.

Back in the Spring of 2020, right after the pandemic hit and the schools shut down, both the Governor and USDOE reminded the public education system that its legal obligations to its students with special needs had not changed in spite of the pandemic and that local education agencies should do everything possible to continue implementing services and supports to students with disabilities during campus closures. But, there was also that extra money set aside by the Governor to compensate students for learning they lost due to unavoidable losses of educational benefits and, presumably, if their local education agencies otherwise botched their pandemic response to the detriment of their kids with special needs.

I’ve been negotiating Informal Dispute Resolutions (IDRs) to claims like these ever since in-person learning resumed, and I’m still dealing with the residual effects of the school closures across my caseload. Which brings me back to this most recent OCR investigation outcome.

What OCR and OUHSD are now doing is working together to repair the harm done to all of the OUHSD students with disabilities at the time of the COVID-related school closures who did not get the services and supports they needed such that they are now owed compensatory education. This is a very big deal!

According to the Resolution Agreement entered into by the District with OCR, OUHSD must send letters to every potentially impacted student and offer a meeting to determine if any compensatory education is owed to them and, if so, document how it will be provided. OUHSD is not being left to its own devices to determine whether it has met each affected student’s needs; OCR will be overseeing OUHSD’s implementation of these remedies to make sure they’re done correctly. OCR will provide the technical assistance to OUHSD to help it clean up this mess and set things straight.

In theory, my work here is done, other than to work with the family of the student for whom I’d filed the complaint to make sure she gets the compensatory education that she is now due. But, for all of the other OUHSD students and former students impacted by this outcome, I still have concerns.

None of the other affected students and their families knew about this complaint. They’re going to get a letter in the mail that they weren’t expecting with an offer to meet with the District to determine if their kids are owed any back-due educational services and not necessarily understand what it is, why they are getting it, or how important it is.

Today’s post is about making sure that the other students who are impacted by this outcome get what they need and are due. I know that OCR will be working with the District to make sure that the families who avail themselves of the offer to meet regarding their possible compensatory education claims have a fair shot at getting the right stuff. I’m not as worried about those families.

The families I’m most worried about are the ones who don’t understand English and/or their rights. We have a fair number of households in the District in which the parents may not be educated sufficiently to understand what any of this is about. Unless they actually take the meeting with the District to learn more, OCR is not in a position to help make sure their kids actually get what they need.

So, my goal with today’s post is to make sure that all the affected OUHSD families are fully aware of what that letter inviting them to meet with the District to discuss compensatory education really means and that they take those meetings and get the remedies that are due to their children. We have to remember that we already paid taxes so these kids could get these services, and then that money was never spent on serving them appropriately during campus closures.

This is about belatedly delivering the services that had been previously purchased by the taxpayers but never actually delivered to their intended recipients. The only part of this that brings new costs into the picture is all of the extra work that will now have to be done to help these kids recoup lost learning and catch back up after having been deprived of what had already been paid for in the first place.

After all of the OUHSD students who were impacted by this outcome, my next concern after that is all of the other students throughout the County whose school districts also refused to provide in-person services during the COVID-related campus closures who were not similarly held accountable by their regulators. The California Department of Education (CDE) has done a shoddy job, in my experience, of addressing these exact same concerns in other area school districts.

None of the school districts in Ventura County, to my knowledge, provided in-person services to any students with disabilities during the campus closures. In fact, I fought tooth-and-nail throughout the period of campus closures with a number of school districts throughout the State to address these same concerns. This instant OCR complaint was just one of many efforts I made to protect my kiddos during campus closures.

One family was able to use their health insurance to get in-home ABA services so their child had 1:1 behavioral supports during distance learning, which was the only reason he was successful, but that was an isolated incident. Another family was able to negotiate a settlement agreement with their district to reimburse the parents for paying for a private aide to come to their house to support their child during distance learning, but that was, again, an isolated incident. Most of my students sat at home with their moms as their 1:1 aides, which either worked or didn’t, depending on the student.

If you look back through the content I created for KPS4Parents during the COVID-related campus closures, you’ll see a lot of what I published back then had to do with the mandates that special education and other disability-related services were required to continue without reductions in services and supports. It’s nice to know that the United States of America has our students’ backs on that point, but they can’t investigate the case of every student with disabilities in America. It took over two years to investigate just this one, although systemic violations were uncovered in the course of it doing so.

I sincerely hope that the outcome of this investigation benefits not only the students of OUHSD who failed to receive appropriately ambitious educational benefits because of the COVID-related campus closures, but also similarly impacted students in all the other school districts that used the pandemic as an excuse to cut corners and not pay for services that were so seriously needed by so many students with disabilities. This outcome needs to impact more students with special needs than just those within the OUHSD attendance area. It needs to set an example.

I find myself frequently telling people that the measure of whether a society is civilized or not goes to how well it takes care of its most vulnerable members, and that special education law is the canary in the coalmine of American democracy. If we can’t respect the civil rights of our children with disabilities, what does that say for the civil rights of the rest of us?

School districts are not for-profit private businesses; they are government agencies funded to execute the functions of our society for the benefit of the public. We should be able to trust our local government agencies, including our local school districts, to abide by the rule of law.

KPS4Parents is currently reaching out to various stakeholders in Ventura County to make sure that the other families affected by this outcome understand exactly what this is, how they are affected, and how to make sure their kids get what they actually need. If you are part of an affected family and need assistance with this process, KPS4Parents will do everything we can to support you, including putting you in touch with other advocates and attorneys if necessary to handle the sheer volume of families who may need this level of assistance.

If you are part of another organization or agency that also serves students with special needs in Ventura County and/or their families, and would like to help area families navigate this process, please contact us and we’ll get back to you as soon as we possibly can. It’s exciting to be part of the solution, but the work is just getting started and our agency can’t do it all alone.

We’re part of the larger community of loving, democracy-minded people who advocate for social justice issues. We need the help of our social justice partners to make sure all of these affected families are properly supported and served, and to help us generalize these remedies to benefit other similarly affected students in other communities. It takes a village, so I’m asking for the rest of the village to step up and help me help all of these other affected families, and for the families who are already experienced with this kind of stuff to help other families who might not be so savvy.

This is an exciting time for systemic change, and I want families of children with special needs to feel empowered by this and set the example on how to participate in our democracy at the local level in a meaningful and impactful way. Bottom line, screaming at school board meetings about their personal beliefs and feelings gets parents nowhere, but regulatory complaints filed to enforce the rule of law can be everything.

Special Education Timelines During Quarantine

Avoiding the spread of disease is obviously the most important consideration, these days, but life hasn’t ground to a halt; it’s just changed. Everyone is doing what they can, right now, to curtail the spread of disease so that we can all live our lives in peace, which doesn’t mean stopping the living of lives while we ride this out.

The whole point of the measures we’re all collectively taking as a planet right now is to preserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, with all of these sudden changes, there is a lot up in the air, right now, with respect to our students with disabilities who require services during extended breaks so as not to regress in their learning.

Even more concerning are our students with special needs that affect their behaviors who are cooped up at home with their parents, who are likely on the verge, already, without any behavioral support services. Those parents are at an increased risk of developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from this whole shelter in place situation.

There are funny memes going around right now about parents trying to home-school their general education children and learning to appreciate their general education teachers, but nobody is making a meme about the mom of an autistic young woman who enjoys regular outings into the community as part of her special education program and is melting down on a regular basis, now, because she can’t leave the house, go to school, hang out with friends, or visit her grandmother in a nursing home. These are the families that are already slipping into crisis while all the rest of us are riding this out and complaining about inconveniences.

For our students with developmental disabilities who require ongoing services in order to make reasonable strides towards a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE), disruptions in services mean developmental stagnation and regression. That means the current school closures are particularly impactful.

Staying at home is important. If you can stay at home, you should. But, as millions of Americans figure out that they can actually still do their jobs, or at least a significant portion of their jobs, from home, and continue to work remotely, our society is finding a way to adapt on the fly to this situation in ways heretofore not possible because of our technology.

As awesome as that is for many private and public entities that are actively figuring this out, one area in which it has evidently not yet been figured out is special education services, or at least a triage solution for our kiddos who will regress, lose significant ground, and miss critical windows of developmental opportunity in the absence of ongoing special education services. Once again, our kids with the most demanding special needs are the last ones to get consideration by stakeholders in this situation.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know how the system tends to respond to certain things. There are predictable patterns in the behaviors of public education agency personnel in response to certain types of situational factors.

Sometimes, when the people in charge don’t know what to do, you just have to give them suggestions about what they could do to get them jump-started. It’s something similar to “Bystander Effect.”

In situations in which the Bystander Effect, occurs, if there are lots of people around when something horrible happens, everybody expects someone else to step up with a solution, so no one does anything. When there isn’t anyone else to respond or just a few people, individuals are more likely to respond in the moment to a crisis.

Here, it appears that everyone is frozen in place waiting for someone else to do something when it comes to meeting the needs of our students with special needs during this current crisis. Rather than waiting for someone to step up and do something, I’m choosing to do what science says we should do when the Bystander Effect has gripped the crowd and everyone seems frozen in place – impose structure.

Imposing structure to overcome something like this isn’t about telling people what to do so much as to signal their brains that the time of waiting for someone else to do something is over and they need to act, as well. Right now. Proposing a solution in a situation like this isn’t about cramming a particular agenda down anyone’s throat; it’s about snapping people out of it so they stop looking at the car crash by the side of the road as they slowly drive by and actually stop their car to get out and help.

We can’t ignore the needs of our students who are at risk of regression and loss of windows of developmental opportunity to learn because of factors beyond their control. These students are the least able to do anything about the deprivations they are experiencing at the moment. They are at our mercy and we can’t afford to be bouncing off of each other like a bunch of hysterical ninnies in panic because we don’t know what to do to help them. We do know what to do. Each child in this situation needs his/her respective village to get its act together and work in a coordinated fashion.

So, in the interest of imposing some structure onto the conversation and planning that now needs to happen, here’s what I am proposing for our students who may need or who already receive special education, so as to prevent a denial of FAPE:

  1. Pending Referrals & Assessments

    1. Child Find [34 CFR Sec. 300.111] – This one is going to be difficult because most public schools are terrible at child find, in general, and most parents don’t even know about it.

      1. Teachers identifying the kids who may need to be referred for special education assessment on the basis of suspected disability will be even more difficult under the current circumstances, depending on how school officials are providing instruction, if at all, during this time of sheltering in place.

      2. Parents may have increased cause for suspecting disabilities when they attempt to assist their children with their school work at home and discover their kids have challenges in processing certain types of information, but they aren’t necessarily expert enough to recognize those challenges as evidence of suspected disability. Further, emotional trauma can cause a child to become eligible for special education under the Emotional Disturbance (ED) category. Parents may find it necessary to refer their children for special education evaluation if they perceive challenges with mastering certain types of concepts in their children while attempting to assist them at home with instruction and/or if their children experience emotional trauma that interferes with their access to education now or upon returning to school once it is safe to do so, again.

    2. Pending Referrals – None of the timelines applicable to referrals for special education assessments plans should be disrupted by the current state of affairs. The only thing that needs to happen in response to any referral is the provision of an assessment plan, pursuant to 34 CFR Sec. 300.9 and 300.300. This is a document-driven administrative process. This has no in-person requirements that would otherwise delay processing. Given that so many people in administrative positions are able to still do their jobs if given the proper tools, there is no physical barrier to carrying out the duties of this step of the process and, therefore, there should be no delay in the applicable timelines just because of the current shelter in place situation.

      1. If a referral was made in writing prior to a student’s school shutting down, an assessment plan should still be provided to the parents within the mandated timeline. Erring by one to five business days may be understandably forgivable given the circumstances and may result in a procedural violation that nonetheless results in harmless error, so parents shouldn’t be threatening lawsuits over something like this.

      2. If a referral is submitted in writing via a manner that is accessible by school personnel, such as via email or through a web portal, during this period of sheltering in place, the local education agency should still act on the referral within the applicable mandated timeline. As a purely document-driven administrative process, this isn’t going to put human beings into physical contact with each other in way that holds up the timeline for the provision of an assessment plan. Parents who want to make such referrals can use our free form letter generator on our site.

    3. Pending Assessments – If a referral for assessment has already been made, an assessment plan has already been signed by a parent, and now the assessment timeline is ticking down, some public education agencies may declare that the timeline is disrupted by the break from instruction due to everyone staying home and sheltering in place. However, that’s not entirely true. For example, the assessment timelines are disrupted under California law for regularly scheduled school breaks and vacations of five or more days, but this shelter in place business isn’t regularly scheduled or a vacation.

      1. Understand that assessment, whether it’s an initial evaluation or a re-evaluation, is considered a related service pursuant to 34 CFR Sec. 300.34. Both 34 CFR Sec. 300.103 and 300.323(c) make clear that a related service cannot be subjected to any unnecessary delays as a matter of legal procedure, as this would delay the provision of services according to an IEP, and, thus, deny a FAPE.

        1. Unnecessary delays include sitting around and freaking out instead of acting. If public education agency officials claim to be working on a solution and weeks go by, they’re not working on a solution; they’re freaking out and wasting everyone’s time. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has already set up mechanisms to keep its complaint and due process systems going; evidently it understands that each State is ultimately responsible for making sure its students get educated, even if their local education agencies waffle under the pressure. If State education agencies can keep their systems going by having their personnel work from home on these administrative duties, the schools they regulate have no excuse for not doing the same, and I suspect State officials will see it that way, too.

        2. Necessary delays would include taking measures in order to otherwise comply with the regulations under the current unique circumstances. If it takes a week or two to put the necessary resources into place, that’s forgivable. Any longer than that without additional extenuating circumstances and all you’ve got is poor leadership within the agency creating unnecessary, and potentially actionable, delays.

      2. It is entirely possible to assess a student who is not medically fragile using the everyday preventative actions being recommended by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

        1. Most special education assessments require at least some standardized testing that is administered in a 1:1 testing situation. An assessor can arrange to conduct standardized assessments in a 1:1 testing location at a school site via prior arrangement without risking an entire classroom or exposing an assessor to either an entire classroom of potentially infected students or household of potentially infected family members of the student being assessed.

        2. Acceptable reasons for delays of any component of assessment in these instances can include illness within the student’s family or that of the assessor that puts them at risk of exposing each other to COVID-19 and a shortage of other assessors to otherwise conduct the assessments or other unique circumstances that might otherwise make a substitute assessor educationally inappropriate, but the delay should not be greater than what the situation actually requires based on what is known at the time.

        3. Public education agencies may need to enlist the support of assessors in the local community to stay on top of assessments as much as possible, and States may need to waive non-public agency licensing requirements under the current circumstances just to make sure everybody who needs ongoing speech/language services, for example, actually gets it.

        4. Classroom observations are going to be the obvious problem for many assessments. Even if an assessor comes to observe a student who is sheltering in place at home, that will not be entirely representative of how that same student functions in a classroom under normal circumstances. It may make more sense to wait until the student returns to school, but the assessment timeline may be ticking down while the child re-acclimates to the school setting, which could include emotional factors that were not present before but which could continue and are, therefore, relevant to the assessment process. Consultations with teachers and parents regarding in-class performance before and after quarantine will become imperative to supply accurate information for the assessment report. Regardless of how a student functioned in the classroom before quarantine, going forward post-quarantine is going to look and feel different for everybody after all of this. Post-quarantine classroom observation data is probably going to be more useful than pre-quarantine classroom observation data.

        5. In an effort to achieve compliance to the degree possible, but with the understanding that some unavoidable delays in the assessment process can legitimately occur because of the current situation, I am strongly recommending to parents and public education officials that short-term individualized response-to-crisis assessment schedules be developed using available technologies to arrive at a plan for each student who is pending assessment so that parents know what to expect by when, school personnel know how to allocate assessment resources, and the process can be kept moving along in a relatively timely manner so that, by the time students return to school, if they need an IEP, the IEP team can have an appropriate one in place for them upon their return. Otherwise, the team can finalize the assessment process once the student returns to school so that IEP team decisions can then be made as intended.

        6. It may be necessary for parents to negotiate timeline extensions with their local education agencies as part of an individualized response-to-crisis assessment schedule, but I am strongly advising parents against agreeing to any such extensions without also including something in writing that describes exactly what is being delayed that necessitates such an extension. For example, if all of the standardized testing can be conducted prior to a student returning to school, but the IEP team agrees that a classroom observation shouldn’t happen until two weeks after the student returns, then the team can agree to keep the assessment process open until the observations can be done, shortly after which the report can be finalized and the IEP team can convene to discuss the results. It may be appropriate for some students in situations like these to complete the evaluation report during this period of quarantine based on what is available so that an appropriate IEP offer is made to the student as soon as possible, with the understanding that classroom observation data will be collected once the student has settled back in and may be used to amend the IEP if it reveals something not already otherwise identified by all the other assessment data on record. So long as parents and schools document their arrangements to get through pending assessments during this situation and the parents give informed consent to any such alternative arrangements, parents will not be inclined to file lawsuits, nor will they have the evidence necessary to argue against delays to which they have, knowingly and with full understanding, consented. Taking these steps will reduce a lot of anxiety about loose ends and what comes next for everybody involved.

  2. Pending IEP meetings – This stands to be one of the biggest procedural challenges simply because of all the IEP meetings that were already on calendar and subject to mandatory timelines at the time that everyone started sheltering in place, but it is still nonetheless one of the easiest situations to solve. 34 CFR Sec. 300.322(c) and Sec. 300.328 require that local education agencies facilitate meaningful parent participation in the IEP meeting process, even if that means using alternative means of participating other than attending meetings in person, such as telephone and video conferencing. While some delay as education agencies get their people set up with the technologies necessary to work this way from home might be within reason, this isn’t something that should cause an IEP meeting scheduled for two weeks from now from not being held at its originally scheduled time without IEP team member agreement. It doesn’t take that much technology to do a conference call and email the paperwork to meeting participants. The law already provides for accommodating the fact that parents and educators can’t always meet in person to conduct IEP meetings, and those laws remain in force, right now.

  3. IEP implementation – This is the grand-daddy of all special education issues facing families of students with special needs, right now. And, it’s a hotbed for lawsuits if local education agencies don’t respond appropriately to the situation.

    1. Online learning options – These options are being proposed for general education students and will work for many special education students, as well, at least in some areas of learning.

      1. Where it will usually not work is with students who have:

        1. Poor task initiation, task maintenance, and/or task completion

        2. Impaired executive functioning and/or attention

        3. Severely delayed communication skills

        4. Severely delayed cognitive development

        5. Vision loss or severe visual disabilities that prevent them from accessing what is on the screen (for students with these challenges who are also receiving speech/language services via a virtual model, it might still work so long as the therapist can see their mouths when they speak, depending on the nature of the therapy)

        6. The forms it can take include:

          1. Video conferencing with teachers and/or therapists

          2. Using online learning games and apps

          3. Conducting research

          4. Watching educational videos

      2. Direct in-home instruction – It may be necessary for teachers to provide home/hospital instruction to students at serious risk of regression on a 1:1 basis in their homes. The law already provides for this option, as well. If it is medically inadvisable for a child on an IEP to go to school, home/hospital is an appropriate placement option under normal circumstances. However, it’s probably fair to say that a judge would not find the current times normal and that every special education student cannot be reasonably provided with in-home 1:1 instruction. This is going to be the area in which education agencies are most likely to get themselves into trouble. If there is any way for teaching staff to use the everyday preventative actions recommended by the CDC to provide 1:1 instruction to those students most at risk of regression, it should be done. Small group instruction of no more than 8 students is still achievable, even if done for fewer hours of the day than normal. One teacher could instruct two or three different groups of no more than 8 students for a couple of hours each day in rotation at a school site and manage to stave off regression and actually continue progress towards FAPE. Individual and small group therapies could also be provided while special education students are on campus, rotating students out so that there are never more than ten people in one place at a time.

      3. Transportation & Other Related Services – Some related services may become unnecessary during alternative teaching arrangements. For example, a student may not need a 1:1 behavior aide to receive 1:1 in-home instruction, but would totally need the aide at school while trying to participate among all the other students. Transportation may not be needed for students who are being served at home but would be needed for those who need to travel to a school site for any direct instruction and/or therapies that cannot be provided any other way. If alternative arrangements are made to serve special education students at risk of significantly regressing while sheltering in place, unusual but temporary transportation services may become necessary in order to implement such an alternative plan. Local education agencies cannot place the burden on parents to transport their children with special needs to school for alternative services during this time, particularly if parents have no way of transporting them. The whole point of special education transportation as a related service is to overcome that very obstacle. If special arrangements have to be made to prevent a student with an IEP from regressing during these current times, those arrangements will have to, by necessity, include an offer of transportation services if the parents cannot otherwise transport the student. Whether or not such related services are necessary really comes down to the individual needs of the child, as always. It’s not like somebody bombed the bus lot; the vehicles are there and the drivers still need their jobs, so, as long as everyone follows proper sanitation and social distancing protocols, transportation services can be provided.

    This is by no means a comprehensive plan. That’s more than one advocate sitting at home on lock-down can develop. It will take State agencies working with their local education agencies to come up with a comprehensive plan. At this point, I have to believe that people are scrambling behind the scenes all over the place to come up with a plan, but the public is still waiting to hear what it is. The families I represent are sitting at home wondering what is going to happen over the next few months. All the information about the schools going around is general in nature and none of it is specific to their children with special education needs.

    To the extent that what I’ve shared can impose some structure on the dialog that needs to be happening right now between parents and special educators, my contribution, here, is food for thought. It’s not my intent, here, to tell anybody what to do. My intent is to break the frozen stance of this quasi-Bystander Effect and stop waiting for someone else to say or do something.

    In a real Bystander Effect situation, if you’re in a crowd and someone suddenly falls to the ground or otherwise experience harm that requires intervention, most people will freeze and look around to see if anybody else is going to do something. In those moments, people who understand what is really happening have to snap out of it and do something.

    The guidance that psychologists are given if we find ourselves in such a situation is to point at the person right in front of us and say, “You! Call 911!” then approach the person in trouble with appropriate caution and, if they are conscious, tell them help is on the way. There’s something magically triggering about issue a command like that because, unless the person you just commanded to make the call has no phone, the call will be made. Suddenly, instead of frozen with uncertainty, that person has a job to do. There’s an action he/she can take to make things move in the right direction.

    Initially, until someone barks a command, everybody is either a deer in headlights or otherwise assumes someone else will take care of it and don’t think they have a role to play. There’s something about barking that initial command that gets everybody working together in unison and it usually doesn’t take more than that. Humans just sometimes need an environmental cue before we know whether, when, and how to act.

    So, that’s basically what I’m doing. Me barking “Call 911!” to someone standing on the other side of a fallen human body isn’t me being bossy. The suggestions I’ve made in this post isn’t me being bossy, either. This is my effort snap all the stakeholders and decision makers out of it so they aren’t standing in a virtual crowd waiting for someone else to say or do something. It’s now been said, public education system. So act.

Texas Education Agency Due Process Guidelines During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In light of the sheltering in place and social distancing currently underway around the country, including in Texas, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) has announced new policies and procedures for special education due process and mediation in these unprecedented times. You can see TEA’s posting at https://tea.texas.gov/about-tea/government-relations-and-legal/special-education-hearings/due-process-hearings.

What we did not find on the TEA site, at least not at the time of this post, are the individual notices that accompanied the email we received announcing these policy changes. They are as follows:.

Questions regarding special education mediation or due process hearings may be addressed to SE-Legal@tea.texas.gov.  Questions regarding the special education complaints process may be addressed to SpecialEducation@tea.texas.gov.

Get Your Facts Straight When Filing Complaints

As much as I personally hate filing complaints against public agencies, sometimes I find it necessary in order to achieve an appropriate outcome for a student with special needs.  It’s not the task of putting together a complaint that bothers me; after over 18 years of advocating for students with special needs, I’ve gotten pretty good at assembling the necessary evidence and figuring out what allegations to assert.  What I hate is what makes complaints necessary – somebody is doing something that deprives a child, to that child’s detriment, of an educational right and that just makes my blood boil.

In special education, there are several types of complaints that can be filed:  due process complaints, compliance complaints, and 504 complaints for the most part. Regardless of what type of complaint needs to be filed, you absolutely, positively must have your facts straight and your evidence together to support the facts of the case.

For the purpose of illustrating my point in this blog posting, I’m going to focus on the filing of compliance complaints with your state’s Department of Education.? Compliance complaints are filed when your local education agency (“LEA”) has violated the regulations and failed to follow the proper procedures, whether those are state or federal regulations.? Compliance complaints do not address issues involving substantive harm; those are the kinds of issues that get addressed by due process complaints.

To help distinguish between the two types of complaints, let’s say that a child’s parents disagreed with his school district’s recent special education assessment results and requested an independent educational evaluation (“IEE”) at public expense but the school district denied the request and took no further action.? Procedurally, this is a violation because the only way an LEA can legally refuse to fund an IEE is to prove through a due process hearing that the assessment with which the parents disagreed was competently performed and sufficient under the requirements of the regulations.

Therefore, in order to deny the parents’ request for the IEE at public expense, the school district would have had to file for due process to assert the appropriateness of its assessment.? All things being equal, it’s usually far less costly for the LEA to simply fund the IEE than to sue the parents to dispute it.

However, let’s say in this example that not only did the district refuse to fund the IEE and fail to file for due process, but that the child continued to fail to receive educational benefit because he had not been competently assessed in all areas of suspected disability by the district and the parents had been right to disagree with its assessment and ask for an IEE.? Now, the child has been substantively denied a FAPE because the IEP team had been without sufficient information about his needs to craft an IEP that was reasonably calculated to render educational benefit.? Further, his parents were denied meaningful participation in the IEP process by being deprived of necessary assessment data and the opportunity to get it via an IEE, which can also be found to result in a denial of a FAPE.

This is the kind of thing that results in a due process filing because the question at this point is:? How much educational benefit did the child fail to receive and what type of compensatory education is he due to make up for this substantive harm? It’s no longer just a matter of whether the district failed to follow the proper procedures; now it’s a matter of what harm resulted from its failure to follow the proper procedures.

Sometimes when parents and advocates are trying to prevent litigation, the best way they can do that is with a well formulated compliance complaint.? If you can get it sustained that the law was broken, you’ve eliminated 50% of the examination a hearing officer would otherwise have to make if the matter were to go to hearing.

A compliance investigator only has to determine whether or not the law was broken.? But a procedural violation that results in substantive harm that is taken straight to due process requires the hearing officer to first determine whether a procedural violation took place and then whether it resulted in substantive harm.

If you have compliance complaint findings that establish for the record that the law was, in fact, broken then the only thing the hearing officer has to determine is whether or not substantive harm resulted from the unlawful conduct.? That the law was broken is a foregone conclusion and presumed to be fact.

This is why, in most cases where I’ve had to file compliance complaints, things quickly de-escalate once the results come back.? The involved LEA knows that any findings against it will end up in evidence and they will have a lot of explaining to do if the case goes to hearing.? The best way to prevent litigation is to prepare for it.

But this sword cuts both ways.? If you file a compliance complaint and the LEA is found to have operated within the law, a copy of your compliance complaint and the findings of compliance will likely be introduced into evidence in due process by the LEA to demonstrate that it hasn’t broken the law and that you are a crackpot filing unfounded complaints, thereby suggesting that your due process complaint is also unfounded and you shouldn’t be taken seriously by the hearing officer.

Due process is not the place to argue that a complaint was wrongly determined by the state’s Department of Education.? There is a separate appeal process for that and a special education hearing officer lacks the authority to overturn a compliance complaint decision or re-try the issue.? The results of a compliance complaint are taken at face value in due process.? Therefore, it’s critically important that you do it right when you initially file so that you are less likely to encounter unnecessary problems later on and that means starting out with having your facts straight and evidence in order.

As with any type of complaint process, compliance complaints are supposed to involve an examination of the facts and a comparison of those facts against the procedural requirements established by the regulations.? Facts are not he-said/she-said opposing points of view.? Facts are things that are borne out by the evidence.

It is in an effort to preserve the facts for the record that we audio record every IEP meeting we attend on behalf of the parents, do everything we can with public agencies in writing (even if that means memorializing our telephone conversations in emails or letters), and request a copy of each student’s records on behalf of his/her parents when we begin a new case.? A comprehensive records review is a necessary part of each case we do.? By arranging all of the documents in chronological order, we can go step-by-step through the story as told by the record and then reconcile that against what the parents told us when they first came to us.

If we become aware of any violations, our first step is usually to document them in a records review report to the parents.? In the very least, we’ll list them out and have a meeting with the parents to talk about them.? From there, our next step as lay advocates is usually to write a letter on behalf of the parents to their LEA outlining the violations and specifying requested remedies, bearing in mind that the remedies we can ask for are limited by what is reasonably achievable were we to file complaints.

Most times, LEAs respond to a succinctly organized and worded demand letter in a constructive manner.? While we’d like to think that this is mostly due to an administrator’s well-intended desire to do the right thing, it has not escaped our attention that it is rather frequently the case that administrators just don’t want to get sued.? They can see how the problems we’ve outlined would not reflect well on the LEA in a compliance complaint or at hearing and the remedies we’re asking for are entirely reasonable.

On the rare occasion that some high-ranking person within the LEA loses his/her mind and decides to treat the situation as a power struggle rather than an attempt to resolve a dispute, our documents speak for themselves and things usually come together eventually.? That’s because we’ve gotten our facts straight and don’t assert things that cannot be borne out by the evidence.

So, in our example above, where the parents disagreed with their district’s assessment and requested an IEE at public expense, which the district subsequently denied and took no further action, we would first go to the district and point out the error of their ways, asking them to please fund the IEE.? If the district dug in its heels further rather than do the right thing, we would then file a compliance complaint alleging a failure to follow the proper procedures when a parent requests an IEE at public expense.

To demonstrate the facts of the case, we would attach as exhibits the following items:

  • The parents’ letter indicating their disagreement with the district’s assessment and requesting the IEE at public expense
  • The district’s letter denying the IEE
  • Our follow up letter pointing out that the district has to file for due process if it’s going to deny the IEE and asking that it reconsider and fund the IEE.

We would be sure enough time had passed after our demand letter for the district to file for due process, then let the record show that it didn’t before filing the complaint.? The more likely outcome, however, is that the district would cough up an assessment plan for the IEE.

You need to be aware of your state’s timelines for filing compliance complaints.? You can contact your state’s Department of Education compliance complaint unit for more information about the complaint timelines.? (In California, it’s one year from the date you knew or should have known about the violation – essentially, one year from the date the violation occurred.)

An example of what not to do might look like this: A parent verbally disagrees with the LEA’s assessment during an IEP meeting and requests an IEE at public expense.? Her disagreement and request are not recorded in the IEP meeting notes.? The LEA’s special education administrator tells her at the IEP meeting that someone will get back to her on her IEE request.? She submits nothing in writing to the LEA expressing her disagreement and weeks pass with no response from the LEA regarding her verbal request for the IEE that was made during the IEP meeting.

Finally, she decides to file a compliance complaint.? She writes a letter to her state Department of Education alleging failure to follow proper procedures in response to a parent request for an IEE at public expense.? She explains in her complaint that she made a request for an IEE after disagreeing with the District’s assessment at the IEP meeting.? An investigation gets opened and the parent gets a phone call from the investigator.? The call might go something like this:

Investigator: “Mrs. Jones, when did you inform the district that you disagreed with its assessment?”

Mrs. Jones: “At the IEP meeting of August 30, 2009.”

Investigator: “I’m looking at a copy of the August 30, 2009 IEP and can’t find any reference in this document to any disagrement on your part to the assessment or a request for an IEE.? Can you tell me what page it’s on?”

Mrs. Jones: “It’s not on any page.? They didn’t write it down.”

Investigator: “Did you subsequently submit anything in writing expressing your disagreement and requesting an IEE?”

Mrs. Jones: “I didn’t think I had to.? We talked about it at the meeting and the administrator told me someone would get back to me about it.”

Investigator: “Did you audio record the IEP meeting?”

Mrs. Jones: “No.”

Investigator: “Mrs. Jones, are you aware that the District claims that you never disagreed with its assessment or asked for an IEE?”

Mrs. Jones: “What?!!!!!”

A few weeks later Mrs. Jones gets a letter finding the district in compliance, explaining that there is no evidence of wrong-doing.

Another example of what not to do would be: A parent is speaking with her child’s teacher at the end of the school day as she picks him up from school.? Unbeknownst to this parent, the teacher has grown to dislike the principal over some unrelated issue.? The teacher will also gossip with whoever will listen, including the parent.? The parent is largely indifferent to the information the teacher discloses to her, but she wants the keep things cool between herself and the teacher for the sake of her child, so she indulges her.

On this particular day, the teacher tells the parent, “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but we had a meeting the other day and the principal told us that she doesn’t believe in full inclusion. She’s planning on placing your son in a special day class at another campus on the other side of town as soon as she can.? I just thought you should know.”? The parent understandably freaks out.

Knowing that placement decisions can’t be made outside of the IEP process, the parent panics and files a compliance complaint the next day alleging that the principal has failed to follow the proper procedures to change her son’s placement.? As it turns out, there is nothing in the record to suggest that the principal had any intentions to try to change the child’s placement.? When asked about it, the principal has no idea what is going on and claims she never said any such thing.

When the teacher is asked about it, she says that the parent must have misunderstood her.? She? tells the investigator that she did tell the parent about a staff training she attended on full inclusion and the types of students who can be fully included, but she never said anything about this parent’s child specifically.? “Besides,” she tells the investigator, “the principal can’t change any special education student’s placement.? That’s an IEP team decision.”

Now the parent looks like a fool and of course the allegation isn’t sustained.? The parent had a knee-jerk reaction and failed to confirm the facts.

The proper course of action would have been for the parent to request a copy of her son’s student records and write a letter to the principal asking if the principal has any concerns regarding her son’s placement that would make the principal think that his placement needed to be changed.? The principal would have been compelled to make the record in response and write back with a formal response.? Upon receiving the records and the principal’s response, the parent would have then been in a position to determine whether or not there was even a need to file a complaint, much less any evidence to support the allegation.

I hope you can see from this how important it is to have your facts straight and your evidence in order before you go off accusing people of anything.? Even if your allegations are true, you have to be able to prove them or they may as well not be.