SCOTUS case: What level of education do public schools legally owe to students with disabilities?

Parent Cafe
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Had to edit the title for length. Original title:

Supreme Court to decide: What level of education do public schools legally owe to students with disabilities?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/supreme-court-to-decide-what-level-of-education-do-public-schools-legally-owe-to-students-with-disabilities/2017/01/10/3e8e14ca-d690-11e6-9f9f-5cdb4b7f8dd7_story.html?utm_term=.b09bd5b3d795

Many of the comments on the article are 1- sickening and 2- why I’m grateful that I became “disabled” in graduate school rather than early on in my life.

I can count the number of students I know in graduate school with fairly significant disabilities (ie ones that need some level of accommodation) on one hand and about half of them developed their disabilities in grad school like I did. The barriers every step of the way discourage many students from seeking higher ed. It’s disheartening.

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I listened to a report on this case yesterday on NPR and they said from the questions it appears the Court is leaning towards the substantially more argument.

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Like most controversial subjects it is just not always black and white. In my affluent suburb I have seen parents doctor shop until they find a special needs diagnosis and then request accommodations. On the other side I have seen special needs students receive no extra accommodations because they earn top grades.

I am surprised this issue is at the SCOTUS level as educational funding varies so much by state laws.

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^That is why it is at SCOTUS. It is an interpretation of a federal law. States are interpreting differently.

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I am generally a strong proponent of civil rights but I think this is a very, very difficult case. I do not think there is an easy answer.

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While the parents here ended up paying $70k for a private school and seek reimbursement, that is not really the issue. if the schools took this seriously, it can cost a fraction of that. In our county they have a “consortium” where they provide these services. Each school hosts a classroom or two. It costs much less, it give the services needed.

Schools have to commit and work together. It’s not just about $.

It’s also not about requiring schools to educate the uneducable. Significan progress is measured against what the child can do, not what other kids do, If schools are allowed to get away with minimal improvements, they will continue doing nothing.

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@MaterS – “accommodations” are a different issue – they fall under a different law. (Americans with Disabilities Act Section 504). This case is about the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) or what you would cal Special Ed

The accommodations generally don’t cause problems for the school, because they don’t require significant expense to implement. (and the law only allows “reasonable” accommodations in any case) – so those are things like extended time on tests.

The IDEA requires schools to affirmatively provide a “free and appropriate” education to special needs students, which can mean specialized educational placement and services. For example, when my daughter was in a classroom with a Down’s Syndrome child, the school had to provide an aide to be with the Down’s Child all day. And that’s a simple example, of a child who was thought to be functional enough to be in a mainstream classroom. There was another room at the same school where there were a group of children with autism - they had their own special teacher(s) and I have no clue what array of educational therapies were offered.

I think that parents who have children with severe special needs may have to see many doctors and specialists in order to get a proper diagnosis. But it’s not a process that parents would take lightly. There is a huge difference in the impact on the student between seeking accommodations and embarking on the IEP process to keep their kids enrolled in special education.

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One person’s doctor shopping is another’s search for the “truth.” (I put truth in scare quotes because the “truth” for many diseases is poorly defined and shifting.)

It took me probably 7 doctors before I finally got a diagnosis for something that actual blood tests exist for!

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^Agree. But doctor shopping does happen. Parents can’t believe their snowflake just needs more acedemic help may push for a diagnosis to get more services.

But it needs to be pretty severe to actually have a child sent out of district. The behavior that child exhibited was classic autism/overwhelmed response. When my kid was 6, his 1st grade teacher pushed the school for services. The school pushed back bc he was at grade level. She told the CSE that she had taught him nothing. Anything he learned was on his own. (He spent half the time at a desk in the hall.). She challenged them if he would be able to do that in 2nd grade. Or 5th. He went to the consortium class for 4 years. Total transformation.

HS is a whole new ball of wax for us tho…

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I’m not denying that it happens, I am just saying that you don’t really know is all.

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The real reason for this lawsuit is sadly some states (which probably is reflected in the comments in the article) have an attitude towards kids with special needs that borders on “hey, if you can’t make it in a regular classroom, well, life’s tough” kind of attitude, and federal law came about to stop states from acting like that. In NJ kids with special needs under NJ law are required to get the help they need, and legally if requested schools have to come up with an individual education plan to spec out this help. If a school says they don’t have the resources, then the school is required to help pay for those services at another school.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think that special ed is misused, their routinely are articles about the NYC public schools where they have kids classified as special needs who basically aren’t, not in the way special ed is supposed to work, they are kids with discipline problems and the like that routinely get thrown into special ed classrooms (I don’t recall the exact percentage, but a significant percentage of kids in special ed classrooms when they were evaluated, shouldn’t have been there), special ed often ends up the dumping ground in some districts for problem kids.

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What does society owe to people who, because of the genetic lottery, ended up with conditions that put them at a disadvantage to the majority of people? This could be anything ranging from mental capacity, to a health ailment, to a physical defect.

Only the most cold-hearted person would say “nothing”. But IMO it is a mistake to say “everything”. If you have only one special needs child in a school district where you need to spend $70K, that can be absorbed the community. If you get dozens of them, that can break the school budget. My data on this is old, but my understanding is that special needs is already around 20% of a typical school district’s budget.

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Consortiums…the schools need to consolidate these services. Too exp for one, but together they can economically.

Educate them now or pay disability and welfare for life:(

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I don’t have firsthand experience with special education in public schools. I imagine there are ways to provide better, more cost effective services. I also understand how abuses can and do occur.

But what I wanted to say is that when I read the article I immediately saw a parallel to healthcare, like hebegebe. The parents in the case are looking to be reimbursed for their up to $70,000 per year private school expenditures.

I’m not here to argue about the amount, but $70,000 per/yr times, perhaps 7 years in this case, is $490,000! I confess that I paused and wondered about how we as a country will go forward when deciding how to allocate limited funding for a wide range of issues like this one. Hence the healthcare comparison. If one individual requires let’s say ‘hundreds of thousands’ of dollars in service, who should pay for it?

It seems more of my fellow citizens are getting frustrated with people they perceive as “sponging off the system”. I see and hear comments like: ‘I don’t want to pay for their birth control…their food stamps…their housing assistance…their ER visit…their kids’ college education’, etc.

The current climate feels so adversarial in nature. It seems like we are entering a period where individuals are going to be denied assistance. Some will say it’s a good thing because people were getting too dependent on the system. However, I wish instead of eliminating or severely restricting services, we as a country, could redirect the hostile energy and channel it in seeking solutions.

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“But what I wanted to say is that when I read the article I immediately saw a parallel to healthcare, like hebegebe. The parents in the case are looking to be reimbursed for their up to $70,000 per year private school expenditures.”

Obviously, that is a big expense, but I think @hrsmom had the best point, that parents shouldn’t have to go that route when seeking help. In a perfect world, the schools would be equipped to handle special needs kids of all kinds, but therein lies the rub. In most places shools are locally controlled, and local school districts have to absorb that cost. In NJ, there are 660 school districts in a small state relatively, and each has its own funding from local taxes and each has its own special ed programs (there are regional districts that work where they have the special ed at one school, but that isn’t all that common). It would make sense to have the state fund these, to set up schools that can help most kids with special needs, but they don’t, because people complain about ‘local control of the school’. For something like this kid, if we had decent special ed done across districts, if you had a kid that was such an outlier, a 70k expense could be paid for by the state rather than the district, and if we had decent special ed few kids would need that…but we don’t live in a perfect world.

The real problem too is as someone as pointed out, looking at someone else as a freeloader, a sponge, often tinged with jealousy, rather than looking at it 'but for the grace of god, go I". The sad irony is many of those who complain about paying for others are often those taking from others, which is part of the problem, people don’t see the whole system and a lot of them are not even aware of how they are ‘sponging’ off of others, subsidized, etc shrug.

And as a pragmatic person, what I would really like to see is a solution, ideas, schools and people willing to figure this out, rather than as happens time and again, courts forcing something that ends up costing a ton of money. This has happened in many states with funding schools with local property taxes, courts have made clear that funding formula leads to gross inequality, they have been fighting over this in NJ for close to 50 years and it still ends up in the courts, because the underlying problem has not been solved, there have been band aids, laws mandating how much a school can spend, but there is no solution.

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It shouldn’t have to come to them pulling the kid and putting them in a 70k school. I think that’s the whole point…

I mean, maybe not depending on how the next few years go…

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Thank you for your insight @HRSMom IDEA is partially funded by the federal government. Consortiums do seem to be the best practice but some parents are adamant about their child being in a mainstream classroom or at the school closest to their home.

It’s interesting that Douglas County is fighting this case. They are a fairly large school district with 61,000 students. I do understand they see this as a precedent that will possibly mean more litigation. We have some very small school districts here with only one school and less than 100 students. I cannot imagine how they could absorb some of these costs, educational or legal.

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About 3-4 years ago, a for-profit set of group homes moved into the school district I live in for the sole purpose of education. Since the district had to provide the teachers and staff for a huge increase in special ed population, reductions had to be made elsewhere. It was an unfortunate case of district shopping. The state wouldn’t reimburse for the extra costs.
As it happened, investigations into the operators and operations of the group homes resulted in the homes being shut down.
The district already covers a severely disabled population at a state-run facility, all funded through normal district levies which cover the costs not reimbursed by the state.

There has to be a common sense approach to paying for educational services for the entire population.

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This isn’t a New Jersey specific practice – it is federal law - you’ve essentially stated the exact terms of the federal law (Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act) that is being litigated in the case referenced in the OP.

The parents are asserting that their state in violation of federal law because the school’s resources are inadequate-- they want the state to reimburse them for the child’s private placement – and the school was saying that their services were good enough. There is no question that the child did better with the private placement – the legal question is what constitutes “good enough”. School is arguing “some progress” – the parents would probably like to argue that they are entitled to “best available”, but legally the case has come down to a discussion of “some” vs. “substantial” or “meaningful.”

This problem is pretty much endemic to the special education system, and if SCOTUS decides in favor of the parents I don’t think it will make much of a difference overall – the schools will just change the language they are using and parents/ schools will continue to quibble over whether the school-provided services are good enough. The problem is that it generally impossible to know what progress the child is capable of except in hindsight - so parents are essentially forced to keep their child in the public school environment long enough to establish a record of poor progress, and then later move the child to a private placement, wait until improvement can be documented, and then come back and sue the schools. Obviously between the cost of the lawyers and the cost of the private schools, this is an option only available to higher income parents.

I do think that the fear among parents of special needs children is that if SCOTUS decides in favor of the district, then schools will have a much easier time of denying these requests for additional services – since “some” progress is quite minimal. Schools would simply put pressure on their staff to document any sort of improvement, no matter how minimal.

A few states have tried to approach this problem by offering vouchers to parents of special needs children that can be applied toward private education. Florida is one – https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/programs/florida-john-m-mckay-scholarships-for-students-with-disabilities-program/ – the vouchers are not nearly enough money to pay the actual costs of the private programs (currently in Florida the vouchers average slightly above $7000 a year) – but they probably are enough to discourage parents from litigating. It is money in hand that can be used immediately, rather than engaging in protracted litigation with the very real possibility of losing the case down the line.

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My mother helped to write the initial federal IDEA, and in many ways helped to create the whole modern concept of special education. Someone upthread used the term “free and appropriate” . She helped to coin the phrase, and it was one that she had many, many long and involved conversations about over the years. In the end, she understood that the word “appropriate” would cause problems and that it would always be open to interpretation. Her feeling on it was that no school district would ever be able to afford a complete education for every child (she firmly believed that in an ideal world every child would have an IEP) but that schools should be aiming to provide each child the education that would allow them to move on to the next stage of their life.

At the time, she was working with kids labeled “severe and profound”. These were kids who for the most part were institionalized, many of them from birth, many of whom could not feed, dress, or otherwise care for their own needs. From her point of view, “free and appropriate” meant that no longer could society lock these kids up and throw away the key. Just as we taught “normal” kids to read, we had to teach these kids the basics of life.

She also understood, that at the opposite end of the scale there were kids whose needs were not being met, in a very profound way, by regular education practices. And in the ideal world, she would argue that “free and appropriate” meant services for those children as well. But in the context of the time, and the limitations of public school budgets, the greatest need was to focus on the children at the bottom, because the kids at the top at least stood a chance of being able to find their way in the world alone.

Interestingly, she always believed that special education is a public school function and firmly believed that most private schools were a bad idea. Mostly because she believed firmly, and would still argue today, that public oversight of the most needy children is a requirement.