The Sad Saga of the CAC for Special Ed Newsletter
Today's School Beat column on BeyondChron tells the sad history of the Community Advisory Committee for Special Education's efforts to get basic information into the hands of parents who lack English skills and/or access to the Internet. The Committee has produced two newsletters since November 2006; the first one was delayed (lost?) "in translation" for almost four months before it actually hit mailboxes. The second, which was completed by the Committee in July 2007, has still not been mailed. Why? Because (according to a District lawyer last week) it's apparently not the CAC for Special Education's role to educate parents on their right to advocate on behalf of their children. Committee members have offered to include a disclaimer on this and all future editions of the newsletter, but apparently our parent-to-parent advice is just too inflammatory to print.
To judge for yourself about just who is overreaching, read CAC Member Katy Franklin's full account of the newsletter saga, including the full text of the legal admonition the Committee received from the district. A PDF version of the unsuppressed newsletter is here.
To judge for yourself about just who is overreaching, read CAC Member Katy Franklin's full account of the newsletter saga, including the full text of the legal admonition the Committee received from the district. A PDF version of the unsuppressed newsletter is here.
Labels: Special Education
5 Comments:
i'm sorry.. but is so difficult to be all things to all people now in this country.
we are accommodating so many different cultures.. i can't see how the ed.depts anywhere can do it all.
After reading the unsuppressed newsletter I can see what the school district suppressed it. It seems to cover the top 10 issues I see in just about every advocacy mailing list I have read, and tells the parents how to deal with them. It took me years to learn that. Think of all the time and effort I could have saved if I had this to start out with.
Once again a school district tries to save money by denying students the education that they are legally entitled to.
Special Ed Dad.
Does the district save money, though, when they deny children services? How much do they spend on legal fees, on mediation hearings and due process hearings to fight parents?
Has anyone ever compared the District's legal costs denying parent requests to to how much it would cost to just give the kid the services the parent requested?
Has anyone ever done a study on how much SFUSD Special Education department's legal fees are?
I remember a case I read about in Irvine, California .. the school district there spent over 500,000 in legal fees in a four year battle fighting a parent over 23,000 worth of services she wanted for her son.
DOESN'T MAKE MUCH SENSE, DOES IT?
In that case, the judge wrote an 83 page opinion about school districts engaging in "repeated misstatements of the record, frivolous objections to plaintiff's statement of facts, and repeated mischaracterizations of the law."
Sounds familiar to those of us in Kafkaesque SFUSD.
That's the problem when you have administrators in power using other people's money (taxpayer money) to play hard-ball with parents to "prove a point". They squander district resources because no one stops them, is there no oversight?
Almost all of the time, the services and therapies parents want are not unreasonable. Sensible things like extra speech therapy if their children are not improving, better trained aides if their children are not doing well in school ... all things that rational people would seem to think are not outrageous to request.
Something has to change.
Hard to imagine what is inappropriate about those two pages, unless the lawyer guy thinks it is inappropriate for parents to know their rights.
They can't censor student articles for school newspapers, but they can censor newsletters to parents?
This is very disturbing.
>but is so difficult to be all things to all people now in this country.
we are accommodating so many different cultures<
This about children with disabilities and how their parents can help them. The newsletter was written for free by qualified parents. No one is trying to be "all things" to any culture.
Post a Comment
<< Home