Forever at odds
Parents voice frustrations with Greenwich’s special education services
GREENWICH — Parent dissatisfaction with the special education department in Greenwich Public Schools has simmered for two decades or more, periodically boiling over when individuals have banded together to demand reform.
That is happening again. After a group of parents aired grievances regarding special education services at the June Board of Education meeting, board members renewed talks of a conducting a review of the Department of Pupil Personnel Services, which administers special education.
On Friday, department director Mary Forde said a focused review by the University of Connecticut is in the works.
“We are going to engage in a special education review process this year,” Forde said this week, adding she will present more details at the BOE meeting on Thursday.
Meanwhile, the parents who spoke out in June joined forces and formed Speducated Greenwich, an independent group that
now numbers nearly 100 members who say they are dedicated to educating themselves and each other and making lasting change. They meet for the first time Tuesday and plan to speak at the school board meeting Thursday.
Greenwich’s specialeducation department, which provided a range of educational and therapeutic services to 1,072 students last year, has been reviewed many times before.
Evidence of discord between parents and educators dates back at least to the Gold Report, a review with recommendations from 1997. Some findings are particular to the time, but others are perennial, including that parents felt at odds with administrators.
This tension, and its effects, were echoed in a super intendent-parent forum in 1999; a parent survey from 2000; a 300page report based on interviews, surveys and document reviews by MGT of America in 2005 and a community forum held in 2008.
More recent reviews have included one of due process cases — those in which parents formally challenge the school system’s plan for their child in a triallike setting — in 2010 by Oswego State University, which was commissioned in response to concerns parents had expressed over time and at a December 2009 meeting.
Five years later, a consultant reviewed the department’s policies and procedures and its high number of mediations and due process proceedings.
All along, state complaints against the district, lawsuits, and interviews with parents and lawyers have told the same story of parents going to battle for their kids.
Administrators failing to identify children for special education evaluations, preying on the parents’ lack of familiarity with special education laws and forcing parents to lawyer up and go to due process are just some of the problems cited — over and over again.
“It is heartbreaking to know that parents are facing the same problems today that we were discussing 10, 15 years ago,” said Paige Davis, the parent of a graduate of Greenwich Public Schools who struggled to learn to read her whole academic career.
From 1997 to 2008, Davis and other parents in the Special Education Services Committee of the Parent Teacher Association met with administrators and collected parent input to impel changes to the special education process and program. Watching new parents
do the same, she said it seems little has been done.
Seven years later, parent Kristin Zisson layman’s investigation determined that the district had qualifications for identifying children with disabilities that were too narrow. While her complaint to the federal Office for Civil Rights led the district to change its policies, she said she is still angry about her experience.
“It is hard,” she said. “You’re trying to parent your child and fight the district on something that they know they need to do under law.”
The many reports have acknowledge bright spots: Many staff and administrators are bright, qualified, committed and caring; the schools have a strong curriculum aligned with state standards; the district’s policies and procedures are thorough, frequently updated and present in all schools.
“As we have gone through 22 years of special education, we’ve seen improvements,” Forde said. “Many of the things in the Gold Report are not applicable anymore.”
The high cost of providing some special education services, including the mandate to place students in private schools if needed, fuels some of the conflict.
In the 201718 school year, for example, Greenwich schools budgeted $22.5 million for special education costs, 14.5 percent of its operating budget that year. That was a $2 million jump from the previous year; and halfway through the term, the systen had already gone nearly $1 million over budget due to numerous due process settlements and tuition for student placements at institutions outside the district.
Greenwich often goes overbudget due to the number of settlements with parents. This year’s budget includes an additional $600,000 for outofdistrict placements, after administrators covered last year’s overages with budget transfers.
“Districts do not have the money to implement the (special education) mandate the way they were supposed to,” said Kathleen Caspiano, an advocate, or nonlegal professional who helps parents navigate the system.
But parents, advocates and lawyers say trying to skimp on services in the short term costs more over time because children who fall farther behind need more services and could open the district to legal disputes.
“People are very shortsighted about the returns in education,” said advocate Gerri Flemming,
The law
The Individuals with Disabilities Act of 1990 requires states to identify and evaluate children for disabilities and provide them with a free and appropriate public education in the leastrestrictive environment — one with the most time spent with generaleducation peers.
Parents can also request a district or independent evaluation, funded by the district. If the district finds no evidence suggesting a disability, it can deny the request, but it must explain why.
If a child is found eligible for services, a group of professionals must meet with parents in a Planning and Placement Team to draft a plan for the child, called an Individual Education Program, or IEP.
PPTs meet at least once a year to review the IEP, but more often if team members think the document should be revised. The meetings are designed so parents, staff who work with the child and administrators collaborate on goals and services for the child and provide progress updates.
If this process breaks down, parents can file complaints with the state, which can lead to a due process hearing, or eventually settle differences with the school district in court.
In practice
In Greenwich, administrators too often delay testing, deny services and deflect problems back to parents, advocate Kit Savage said.
Back during the 2008 community forum, parents said they were told to “wait and see” if their children improved when they reported concerns that their children had disabilities and requested evaluations.
That complaint has not gone away over the years. Multiple parents of current students and graduates from the district said administrators told them this when they sought interventions, and lawyers in Fairfield County said they have represented families who have dealt with this approach. Among 55 members of Speducated Greenwich who responded to an informal Greenwich Time survey, 45 agreed or strongly agreed that district administrators say those same words now.
Another parent told Zisson, who suspected her child had a few disabilities, to have her son tested independently. Zisson said she realized the district would not offer testing as an option because it would have to pay.
The district never evaluated her son, who was found to have two disorders, including ADHD, she said. He was eligible for inclass accommodations under Section
504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which is separate from the disabilities act and provides for accommodations — such as extra time on tests — to perform gradelevel functions along with peers.
Parents’ disadvantage
Consultants hired by the district have found, and parents report, the adversarial relationship often continues once kids are found eligible and the PPT meeting is convened.
Lawyers and advocates say parents struggle to be on equal footing with administrators. Parents, especially firsttime parents, working parents or parents who are nonnative English speakers, are often at a disadvantage because special education is not their profession.
“At every level, people were talking in circles around me because they knew I didn’t understand the law enough,” Zisson said.
“Greenwich is shutting parents out of their kids’ education, and marginalizing them in the PPT process,” Savage said.
Their observations echo what consultants found in 1997 and 2010. Gold consultants found professional teams used considerable jargon and parents appeared overwhelmed with data. One staff member said the typical meeting is “not userfriendly.”
Thirteen years later, the Oswego team reported parents found meetings “overwhelming, confusing, confrontational or combative.”
“Parents are supposed to be able to collaborate on concerns and receive the respect and consideration that they know their child,” Savage said.
Teams try to make the meetings feel as accessible as possible, by clarifying parents’ questions and giving them information ahead of time, all within the restrictions that regulations impose, Forde said.
“Sometimes, that doesn’t feel userfriendly, and unfortunately, it is,” she said.
How parents fight back
When “overwhelming” escalates into “confrontational,” parents often fight back — a development that costs the district money, the MGT report said. Consultants recommended that the district review its disputes and change the practices that expose it to litigation.
Forde said requests for inervention are relatively stable, although more frequent than other comparable districts because Greenwich is large. The rate is generally consistent with Fairfield, she said.
“It’s troublesome,” she said. “I don’t like to engage in due process.”
The root of disagreements is the term “appropriate,” about which the Individuals with Disabilities Act is inadvertently vague, she said.
Parents who find public school services inappropriate can place their children in other schools and sue the district for tuition, or keep their children in the district and pursue for more services.
The majority of these cases are closed after being assigned to a hearing officer because the parties seek to settle the dispute in mediation. Parents and administrators often come to terms on a new level of service, and parents sign a nondisclosure agreement in exchange. From 2013 to 2015, 19 of 26 Greenwich cases assigned to hearing officers were resolved through agreements and settlements.
The state adjudicates unresolved disputes. Of the 144 fully adjudicated cases in the last 20 years, 14, or 10 percent, came from Greenwich. In eight of the cases, the state ruled in favor of the parents.
In these cases, the district was cited for failing to identify children for services, for not providing a free and appropriate public education and for writing inappropriate IEPs, experiences that led some of these parents to pull out their children and place them in private schools.
Forde said it is unfortunate that the district has to debate what is appropriate for the child in a legal forum.
“It’s not our goal,” she said. “Many of these families will be with us for 10 to 15 years, so we don’t want it to be adversarial.”
Zisson, a freelance journalist, decided not to hire a lawyer, but instead to investigate.
Documents she requested revealed that Greenwich was training teachers to use less than half the criteria that the federal government says can qualify a child for accommodations under Section 504, she said.
When the Office of Civil Rights investigated her complaint, it cited the district with a violation, despite the district’s lawyers’ attempts to have edits made afterward to frame the outcome as a “voluntary compliance correction,” according to emails between lawyers and the OCR.
“(Special education is) the only system I know that when you get caught doing the wrong thing, all you have to do is the right thing,” Caspiano said. “There’s no incentive to do the right thing. You saved money all the times you didn’t.”