SPECIAL ED PARENT COMPLAINTS ON THE RISE IN NYC

Thanks to Pat Dobosz for sending out this article from The City showing that there has been a huge increase in parents of special needs students filing complaints that their children have not received special education services they are entitled to.

Complaints filed against the city Department of Education by parents of special education students have skyrocketed since 2014 — sparking a “crisis” that leaves some kids without essential service for months on end, a state-commissioned report found.

The flood of parents battling the public schools system for support is threatening to overwhelm a dispute-resolution system suffering from too few hearing officers and inadequate space to hold hearings, according to the external review obtained by THE CITY.

Complaints jumped 51% between the 2014-’15 and 2017-’18 school years, the report found. That surge has continued into the current school year, with 7,448 complaints filed as of late February — more than the total for the entire prior school year.

The average complaint was open for 202 days in 2017-’18, according to State Education Department data.

Growing complaints have caused a “crisis” that could “render an already fragile hearing system vulnerable to imminent failure and, ultimately, collapse,” Deusdedi Merced, of Special Education Solutions, wrote in a 49-page report obtained through public disclosure law and provided to THE CITY.

“That it has not yet collapsed is remarkable given the staggering numbers of due process complaints filed in New York City.

The article next provides an example of a student who has never had his Individualized Education Plan adhered to in four city schools. This is no surprise.

Special ed neglect is a legacy of former mayor Michael Bloomberg's small schools' policy, at least at the high school level. I have heard from multiple people in different schools that special education services are not sufficient because small schools in general can't possibly provide all of the necessary programs for the students in the small schools that have IEPs that call for varied services. It is also not uncommon from what I have heard to "dump"  special education students into general ed settings with inadequate support.

The City article addresses some of this further down:

“A significant amount of time has been spent trying to get these cases to settlement, so that process can sometimes take six to eight months itself,” said Nelson Mar, a senior staff attorney at Bronx Legal Services.

He noted the root of the problem is that public schools simply don’t have enough services to cover the needs of many of the city’s 224,000 special education students.

New York City logged more due process complaints than California, Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania combined, according to 2016-’17 data collected by the state Education Department.

“The reason why you’re seeing these astronomical numbers is because they have never addressed the fundamental problems with their delivery of special education services,” said Mar. “There’s not enough programs and not enough staff to provide services.”

 Special education is another area where the NYC schools are shortchanging students and parents while putting teachers in impossible situations.