Recently in Special Education News Category

An excellent article in today's New York Times about the challenges and promises decades of special education have delivered for autistic children.

People with autism, whose unusual behaviors are believed to stem from variations in early brain development, typically disappear from public view after they leave school. As few as one in 10 hold even part-time jobs. Some live in state-supported group homes; even those who attend college often end up unemployed and isolated, living with parents.

But Justin is among the first generation of autistic youths who have benefited throughout childhood from more effective therapies and hard-won educational opportunities. And Ms. Stanton-Paule’s program here is based on the somewhat radical premise that with intensive coaching in the workplace and community — and some stretching by others to include them — students like Justin can achieve a level of lifelong independence that has eluded their predecessors.

“There’s a prevailing philosophy that certain people can never function in the community,” Ms. Stanton-Paule told skeptics. “I just don’t think that’s true.”

With some 200,000 autistic teenagers set to come of age in the United States over the next five years alone, little is known about their ability to participate fully in public life, or what it would take to accommodate them. Across the country, neighbors, employers, colleagues and strangers are warily interacting with young adults whose neurological condition many associate only with children.

Read the complete article here.

Today's NYTimes has an excellent article about the horrors in New York's residential care system for the developmentally disabled. Despite spending as much as $1.4 million per resident, the "system" has failed most of its residents with sub-standard care, abuse and death.

These institutions spend two and a half times as much money, per resident, as the thousands of smaller group homes that care for far more of the 135,000 developmentally disabled New Yorkers receiving services.

But the institutions are hardly a model: Those who run them have tolerated physical and psychological abuse, knowingly hired unqualified workers, ignored complaints by whistle-blowers and failed to credibly investigate cases of abuse and neglect, according to a review by The New York Times of thousands of state records and court documents, along with interviews of current and former employees.

Since 2005, seven of the institutions have failed inspections by the State Health Department, which oversees the safety and living conditions of the residents. One was shut down altogether this year.

Read the article on the NYTimes website here.

In a recent little noticed unpublished First Circuit decision, former USSC Justice Souter held that "whatever the scope of a school’s responsibility towards its students . . . there is no apparent constitutional obligation to impose physical restraint upon teenagers not at immediate risk of harm to themselves or others."

This case was brought by mothers of teenagers who were not physically restrained by school officials from leaving their schools during instructional hours. The mothers brought action under state law as well as 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and § 1988 seeking monetary and injunctive relief for violating Fourteenth Amendment due process, the mothers’ right to preserve family integrity and the children’s right to enjoy freedom from abuse and neglect.

The school system explained their policy of permissiveness by referring to a state education regulation limiting use of lawful physical restraint to instances in which children’s unfettered behavior would raise a risk of “assault or imminent, serious, physical harm” to themselves or others; absent such danger, the prevention of truancy would not be worth the burden of defending the liability claims that would doubtless eventuate.

The magistrate judge hearing the case below recognized that the schools’ refusal to confine children to school premises during school hours effectively converted the state’s compulsory attendance law into the children’s option to wander off into trouble that the parents could not effectively prevent. He suggested that the mothers consider the possibility of relief from the general regulation through Individual Educational Plans for their children as special education students.

The mothers argued that inadequate supervision in schools infringes their rights to maintain the integrity of their families under Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925), cases that held it to be beyond the power of states to limit a parent’s choice to provide foreign language instruction in elementary schools or to resort to private education. The Court found, however, that these cases recognized a parent’s liberty to be free from state interference with certain education choices, not a right to require state or local government to run public schools in a way a parent might think they ought to be administered. Any actionable interference with family integrity must be “directly aimed at the parent-child relationship.” Manarite v. Springfield, 957 F.2d 953, 960 (1st Cir. 1992).

Judge Souter further found that the Supreme Court’s discussion in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189, 199-200 (1989), is on point: “[W]hen the State takes a person into its custody and holds him there against his will, the Constitution imposes upon it a corresponding duty to assume some responsibility for his safety and general well-being." According to Souter:

The situation of the children in this case is not even close to facts that would thus raise a state obligation. There is neither restraint of the child (that indeed is the very complaint), nor any practice or circumstance rendering the child unable to care for himself, nor failure to provide basic human needs of food, clothing, shelter, medical care or reasonable safety. As the Supreme Court later observed in Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646, 655 (1995), “we do not, of course, suggest that public schools as a general matter have such a degree of control over children as to give rise to a constitutional ‘duty to protect’” (citing DeShaney, 489 U.S. at 200).

This decision did not consider any rights parents might have under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act [IDEA] or other state or federal regulation. Clearly, the court might have found that a policy and practice of allowing special education students to leave with impunity might effectively deny them a free appropriate public education [FAPE]. Beyond this, however, there is no Constitutional duty for schools to keep children in the classroom, nor is there any apparent duty to insure their safety or well-being (or even notice to the parents or police) once they leave school grounds.

The case is Saez v. City of Springfield.

USSC Update - IDEA permits reimbursement for private sped services even though child never attended public school Link

USSC prev Forest Grove v. T.A. - must SpEd student enroll in public school b4 unilateral private school placement? Link

US Dept of Ed releases new guidance on interrelationship between Section 504, the ADA, and the IDEA Link