Court ruling fault belongs to HCDE

In response to the ruling that the Hamilton County Department of Education violated the rights of a student with disabilities to receive a free appropriate public education in his least restrictive environment, the Chattanooga Free Press editorial page editor posits that this may “cause more problems than it solves” by “forcing districts to face a faster, steeper and more expensive learning curve than necessary.”

The rights of students with disabilities that HCDE violated were codified into law more than 40 years ago and reaffirmed more strongly in 2008 in the re-authorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. If HCDE has failed to follow the law for the last 40 years and certainly the last 10 years — and must “face a faster, steeper and more expensive learning curve” — the fault is strictly HCDE’s alone. This is a systemic problem caused by HCDE’s former superintendent and special education administrators’ unwillingness to adopt the widely applied and accepted practice of “mainstreaming,” just as the federal district court and the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled. With a new superintendent and special education administrators and supported by the ubiquitous training and resources on mainstreaming, HCDE should operate lawfully and in-step with modernity. Deborah Rausch, Mother of Luka Hyde