In a decision that could help disabled students obtain needed services and cost school districts millions of dollars, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that parents of special-education students may seek government reimbursement for private school tuition, even if they have never received special-education services in public school.
The case before the court involved a struggling Oregon high school student, identified in court documents only as T. A., whose parents removed him from public school in the Forest Grove district in his junior year and enrolled him in a $5,200-a-month residential school.
Although Forest Grove officials had noticed T. A.’s difficulties and evaluated him for learning disabilities, he was found ineligible for special-education services. Only after he enrolled in the private school did doctors say T. A. had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other disabilities.
While most of the nation’s six million special-education students attend public school, as T. A. did for many years, thousands of families with disabled children, convinced that the public schools lack appropriate placements, avoid the public schools altogether. Instead, they enroll their children in expensive private schools for students with emotional or learning disabilities, and then seek reimbursement.
Nationally, about 90,000 special-education students are in private schools, most of them referred by their public schools.
In 2007-8, the New York City schools, which filed a friend-of-court brief supporting Forest Grove, paid $89 million in private-school tuition for disabled students whose parents had placed them there, up from $53 million two years earlier. In 2007-8, the city received 4,368 requests for reimbursement from parents who enrolled their children in private school; of those, more than half had not received services in public school.
The issue in the Forest Grove case was whether a 1997 amendment to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (or IDEA) prohibited private-school tuition reimbursement for students who never received special-education services in public school.
The amendment says tuition may be available for students with disabilities “who previously received special-education” services in public school, if the school did not make a free and appropriate public education (or FAPE) available in a timely manner.
Forest Grove, backed by school-boards associations across the country, argued that the amendment precluded reimbursement for those, like T. A., who never received special-education services in public school.
But the high court, in a 6-to-3 ruling, rejected that argument.
“We conclude that IDEA authorizes reimbursement for the cost of private special education services when a school district fails to provide a FAPE and the private school placement is appropriate, regardless of whether the child previously received special education or related services through the public school,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the majority opinion.
1 comments:
I know that there are lots of folks predicting school bancruptcy and other dire results from this ruling. I am far less certain that the impact will be wide-ranging. First, it is my impression that districts' willingness and ability to act on any legal requirements for the education of kids with disabilities is widely variant. I have hung out a lot with parents of kids with disabilities and the misinformation that they have received from their districts is vast (things like--Federal law doesn't apply here, we have our own policy; or we can't test a kid until they are a grade level behind; or your kid only gets an hour a week of OT, or PT, because that's all we ever give; as well as suspending kids past the ten day limit; putting them on "home instruction" because they "can't handle" school). The kids who are most likely to receive an education such as the law intendend are those with well educated parents who can read up on the law and advocate for an IEP that actually relates to the kids needs. Even then there's no guarantee that anyone will actually carry it out.
This family was able to access services for their kid--at a pretty great cost, and considerable risk that they might never be reimbursed. The school had denied him services twice already. Most families, even with this court ruling to improve the odds of eventual reimbursement, don't have the up front bucks to pay the tuition, the savvy and the bucks to get a lawyer to take the thing through due process and the time to wait before something is actually decided.
It would be nice to believe that schools would try harder to meet kids needs as a result of the ruling. But, I don't know if the average classroom teacher, the average principal, and even some of the special ed directors or school attorneys are paying that much attention.
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