Parents may be reaching tipping point on special ed failures
GREENWICH — I started writing a column for this newspaper almost 10 years ago, and I hear frequently from parents with one nightmarish story after another about the difficulty of navigating the special education services world in Greenwich.
A student who cannot read, but has been promoted every year since kindergarten, and now also suffers from depression and other mental illnesses. Elementary school children who were denied special needs evaluations for several years, and
now are way behind their peers academically and have behavioral problems.
These are not isolated instances of children falling through the cracks of an otherwise effective special education system.
The stories come from all corners of town, and all levels of school. Each time parents tell me one, they then insist on my not using their names, because they do not want to add to their child’s pain or further embarrassment, and, they say, because they fear retribution from administrators.
This is not a small problem. Approximately 1,000 kids, that is, one out of every nine Greenwich Public Schools students, are certified to receive some form of special education service, be it extra hours of class time, reading specialists or the full attention of a paid professional assistant. The diagnoses range from dyslexia and ADHD to more severe emotional and physical ailments. And, special education consumes roughly 25 percent-30 percent or so of the school system’s annual $150 million operating budget.
Parental dissatisfaction with special education is not a new phenomenon in town; three times in the last eight years (or through six superintendents) the school board has commissioned a review of how Greenwich delivers special ed. That the school board asked to have the same subject reviewed three times in fairly rapid succession indicates that no one really has a handle on what the problems are or how to best address them. The third review was requested at the end of school year 2018. No report has been forthcoming, nor has the board asked for a presentation. How’s that for futility? When the town changes superintendents every year, troublesome reports and other school board requests are conveniently forgotten.
But there are signs that disgruntled and frustrated parents are reaching a tipping point that might finally get the attention of administrators and the Board of Education. I saw an email thread this week in which a dozen or so mothers were sharing their special ed horror stories, and suggesting that they find a way to leverage the strength of their numbers. Meetings are being organized, stories shared, and a class action lawsuit suggested.
It would somehow be very appropriate if it took a class action lawsuit to clarify what services the town has to provide, where it needs to provide them and at what cost. The special ed process is not at all transparent, and many parents only get the attention of the district when they hire a lawyer. This gets expensive very quickly, and many families do not have the money to pay a lawyer. A class action effort would spread the costs around, but it is also a long process with an uncertain outcome.
Given the steady drumbeat of complaints about special education, one has to wonder how the Board of Education can condone what appears to be a very contentious, adversarial relationship between parents and school administrators. I hope the moms who email get together and take action. Women have changed the Greenwich political scene in the last two years; maybe they will also change the educational system. Too many kids have been underserved for too long. How many more lives have to be stymied from the start before the school board wakes up and finally fixes what is a very broken system?