SameButDifferent

On 9/4/2018 at 1:46 PM, Reefmonkey said:

I've noticed a trend in the last few years of unflattering reporting on local media portrayal of how local school districts handle students with disabilities. Generally, the articles portray the districts as uncaring and not wanting to acknowledge or provide services for children with disabilities, and portray the parents as noble crusaders for their childrens' rights under the law. The district is portrayed as ducking comment on the issue. Rarely do the articles ever prominently acknowledge that schools are prohibited under FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) from commenting at all on the situation. The parents can badmouth the district all they want, can even make up lies about the district, and the district cannot defend itself or even counter the lies. Greg Groogan with Fox 26 is especially prolific in championing the parents and neglecting to mention the schools are under what amounts to a gag order. Groogan himself is one of those parents who feels his own child's autism was not properly handled by a school district, which calls his impartiality into question

 

I've personally seen school districts' sides of contentious cases where parents are claiming the districts denied FAPE. I've seen very often parents are refusing to accept schools' good-faith evaluations of their children and determination that they do not qualify for special education services, and I've also seen that there are many parents out there whose children have been identified, and given services, but the parents want more, and take the districts to due process, or even federal court. When parents win, they report having been vindicated, but when the school wins, it's almost never reported as a vindication for the district. If it gets reported at all (again, under FERPA, the districts can't report their victory) it gets reported as parents getting "railroaded" by a system that is "stacked against them." So what does not get reported is how often parents take districts to due process for ridiculous reasons, demanding atrociously expensive and unfeasible accomodations, even including paying for private school tuition amounting sometimes well over $100,000 a year.

 

Because of FERPA, I cannot provide specifics on most of the cases I know about. However, I can cite a case that occurred in Massachusetts that demonstrates what I am talking about, since it went to federal court and became a matter of public record this year. The case is Lincoln-Sudbury Regional School District vs Mr. and Mrs. W. The W's daughter, Wallis, was a sophomore in the local high school when she suffered a concussion in field hockey practice at the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year. She returned to school after two weeks, was given accommodations for having missed those weeks, and continued making the same high grades after the concussion as she did before. However, she did struggle somewhat in a very advanced math class she was taking, and in May 2013, her teacher recommended that she take a less rigorous but still advanced math class the next year. Her parents began to claim that Wallis was a disabled child, and accused the school of failing to comply with their legal obligations to provide her with special education. In September 2013, they removed her from the Lincoln-Sudbury schools and enrolled her at Lawrence Academy, a private school. (Wallis is now an honors student at George Washington University). They then took the district to due process to demand that the district reimburse them for the private school tuition. It was a long drawn out process that cost the school district tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, drawn out mostly by the parents' delay tactics where they demanded that hearing officer after hearing officer recuse themselves, before it was found that the school had met all the legal requirements, and the parents' claims were "patently frivolous" and brought for "an improper purpose." The district then sued the parents in federal court for attorney's fees, while the parents countersued for a motion of summary judgement on their counterclaim appealing the due process hearing. The federal court found for the school and against the parents on all filings.

 

Lest you think that this Massachusetts case is an isolated one that happened far from Houston, there is a similar case that happened here in Houston just last year which I can talk about, because the mother waived privacy to try to garner publicity for her fight. The mother is Tianna Hall, a self-appointed crusader for autism rights in schools. Her autistic son was getting Extended School Year services over the summer, but she decided he wasn't getting enough, and was "regressing" over the summer, so she paid for private interventions, and then demanded that the school district, Spring Branch, reimburse her. Not only was it found that her son had not regressed as she claimed, in the course of the hearing it was discovered that she had made multiple false statements (contradicted by her own posts on social media), had been giving her son marijuana on her own belief that it would help him, and it was found that her own behavior in the home was adversely affecting her son. Additionally, the hearing officer made the rare move of chastising her in his decision for false personal attacks she had made against Joni Warren, the head of the special education department. It should be noted that Greg Groogan came to sessions of the due process hearing to support Tianna Hall and take pictures with her that she posted on social media, but Groogan didn't report on this story once the hearing officer released his findings.

 

These are not isolated cases, school districts have to deal with these kinds of frivolous demands all the time. Most of the time the districts cave and give the parents as much as they can because it's less expensive than lawyer fees, and sometimes this includes paying for private school tuition. There is a cottage industry around this, with "special education advocates" charging parents by the hour and going in and demanding every service under the sun from the district, no matter how inappropriate for the particular child. The most notorious among them is Louis Geigerman. Geigerman has no schooling or experience in the fields of education or psychology, and he uses one or two psychologists who will say whatever he pays them to in order to counter the schools' evaluations. Geigerman is regularly quoted as an "expert" by Fox 26.

 

Recently there have been reports on the local media (first reported by Fox 26) of physical abuse of a 20 year old autistic student at the Harris County Department of Education's ABS-West. Even the Texas Education Agency found ABS-West had violated policies, and certainly it is important that this be reported and fixed. However, the local media vilification of ABS-West and the HCDE has been over-the-top. Students do not get sent to ABS-West unless they have showed significant levels of violence towards themselves or others, so much so that the local schools' special enclosed Alternative Behavior classrooms cannot handle them. The teachers in the districts' alternative behavior classrooms regularly get spit on, have chairs thrown at them, get bitten, punched, kicked, scratched, etc. get told they are going to be killed, etc. I've seen the multiple bruises and scabs from scratches my own wife has come home with - and these are the students that the schools believe they can handle on their own - imagine how dangerous the students they send to ABS-West are. Imagine a whole school of students like this, and as a teacher having to deal with nothing but these kids all day, every day. I can believe that the employees of ABS-West lose their cool from time to time - but that is reason to provide them more services, more support, not vilify teachers who are underpaid to be physically and verbally abused all day.

 

Even in cases of teachers within school districts using excessive physical manipulation on students, the local media tends to exaggerate and report the parents' claims as fact. In April 2016, Greg Groogan reported "a child challenged with Down Syndrome, was throttled and thrown to the ground by an adult special education teaching assistant." This was not true. The incident was captured on surveillance cameras, the child was supposed to be sitting, was noncompliant, and the teaching assistant put one hand on the child's shoulder, no where near his neck, and attempted to push him into a seating position. The child then flopped down on the ground, which was a tactic he used when he was noncompliant. The district rightly fired the teaching assistant immediately, but the District Attorney's office, on viewing the tape, found no reason to press charged. The mother was going around telling the story of her child being "choked", and also claimed that the district had not allowed her access to the video, which was not true, the district had allowed her to view the video, but had not granted her request for a copy of the video, because it had images of other students who were protected by privacy laws and they could not allow her to distribute it.

 

What I hope to accomplish by posting this is not to argue that districts are perfect, but to hopefully raise awareness that there are parents out there looking to game the system, not above exaggerating or even outright lying about schools, and there are local reporters, some with their own biases and axe to grind, perfectly happy to print these parents' sob stories as fact, without acknowledging that schools are barred by law from publicly defending themselves against even defamatory false accusations.

There needs to be a law for schools to countersue and not allow unreasonable parents to take advantage of schools. 

If you think advocates in Houston are bad, you should see the ones in Clear Creek ISD, especially Karen Cunningham. Having failed in stand-up comedy, Karen has turned to the world of special education theatre. She pulls off some super shady stuff and attacks teachers, paraprofessionals, diagnosticians, LSSPs, SLPs, OTs, at the behest of needy privileged parents. Her clientele are mostly privileged and irrational people like Angel Webb, Kimberly Green Barnett, and Jamie Reece. Karen bad mouths school staff in ARD meeting meetings to impress the emotionally unstable and needy parents, all the while negotiating with middle management administrators like Billye Trader and Cynthia Peltier. They're basically in cahoots and essentially throw the school employees under the bus. Karen gets the satisfaction of boosting her ego, wallet, and public image amongst the "Angry CCISD Parents of Facebook", and the middle managers get to sweep problems under the rug and save the school money (going to court costs the school money and they will NEVER get reimbursed for legal fees). Better for the Billyes and Cynthias to just give in and save their hides at the expense of the actual educators. 

Karen and the school administration knows the things she pushes for is complete nonsense, but will do anything to feed her ego and her wallet.