Humanity denied: Readers sound off

Abusive practice

Texas prides itself on how it takes care of its own. Really? If it weren’t for the courage of the families and a few educators speaking out, and the research that reporter Brian Rosenthal conducted, this practice of denying special education services would never see the light of day.

It has taken 13 years for this abusive practice to surface. Evidently, that is what its creators hoped would happen when they buried the legal notice deep within an obscure publication (page 5,579) in 2003 when the “policy” launched. Where can parents go when they repeatedly try to get help for their children and are rebuffed again and again by the very people who are supposed to help them?

Since special ed students are twice as expensive to educate, and with the federal government paying only onefifth of the extra costs, our TEA has devised a system that would produce savings on the backs of the children who can least afford to be neglected. Every citizen of Texas should be outraged. Mary Lib Guercio, The Woodlands

Not the whole picture

I accepted Houston Chronicle reporter Brian Rosenthal’s request to be interviewed for his story on special education in Texas after providing volumes of data that he requested over the last several months. When the article was published, I was disappointed to see that nothing I said during our hour-long, face-to-face interview in my office made it into the article.

I am proud of the work our team does to meet the needs of 16,000 students with disabilities in the Houston Independent School District. We appreciate and respect parents of these children, and we do not take their trust in our schools lightly.

In HISD, we endeavor to address each child’s unique needs through proactive, preventive research-based interventions. When possible, we strive to avoid labeling children because research shows that the “special education” designation can carry an unfair stigma in our society that can harm a child.

Houston schools are currently serving 3,000-plus students with dyslexia through reading interventions that, in most cases, avoid giving them the “special education” label. In 2010, only 560 HISD students were identified as having dyslexia. During that same time period, we have seen a 64 percent increase in students identified with autism.

The decline in HISD’s special education population resulted from an intentional decision to more thoughtfully address the needs of students who, in the past, would have been labeled under special education. In HISD, we believe that serving children should be our goal, not putting a label on them.

I urge any parent who believes their child needs to be evaluated for special education services to contact us, and I give my personal assurance that their child’s needs will be fully addressed. Parents can access many resources on our website, including the process for referring their child for an evaluation.

Sowmya Kumar, assistant superintendent for special education, Houston ISD

Curious calculation

As a parent of two boys on the autism spectrum who have attended Katy ISD schools, and as a local and national advocate for students with autism and other disabilities, I am very familiar with the stress put on families whose children are not properly identified for special education services. I have been aware of the “cap” on special education rates in Texas for many years and have always felt it was unethical if not illegal.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, rates of autism began to climb precipitously beginning in the late 1980s. Since then, there has been an exponential increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism and certainly by the late 90s and early 2000s, the influx of children with a high level of needs must’ve been on TEA’s radar.

In Houston ISD the rate of autism is 1 in 118 — far below the prevalence of 1 in 68 measured by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In adjacent Katy ISD, the rate is 1 in 50. Either one has to believe a 10-minute drive from Katy confers tremendous protection from an autism diagnosis, or HISD is derelict in its duty to properly identify students.

TEA’s blatant disregard for federal law has caused unknown academic, social and economic hardship for all students who are not identified for services because of the cap, but it has disproportionately hurt students of color. When students don’t succeed, all of society pays.

This is just one more area — albeit a large one — where Texas fails people of all ages with disabilities miserably.

Leslie Phillips, Katy

What law and order?

Texas’ failure to meet the needs of its special education students is particularly galling and hypocritical. Indifference to these shortcomings or inaction is considerably costlier financially than helping children reach their full potential in their formative years. These policy failures are unsettling contradictions in a state that purports to focus on the health and well-being of its unborn, children and families. For a “law-andorder” state, Texas doesn’t follow the law. Dennis Toombs, League City

Silent voices

The Chronicle’s reporting has opened a portal into the pernicious reality of special education in Texas. TEA wrote the policy, but superintendents and special education directors went along. Despite the policy’s overt, blatant conflict with the Texas Educator Code of Ethics and federal and state civil rights and educational laws, and the moral mandate to put children first that drove them to public education careers, educators went along.

They demanded no hearing at the state Capitol. They did not organize to march down Austin’s Congress Avenue, or threaten to collectively quit in principled protest. They did not marshal teachers and families to rally for the right thing for our state’s most vulnerable children. Indeed, they did exactly the opposite. Abetted by lawyers paid for by the taxpayers of Texas, scores of Texas education administrators have become experts in the fine arts of cover up and victim-blaming.

As a Houston ISD trustee said, shame on everyone who was complicit in this. Cheryl Fries, Austin

What do we value?

My colleagues and I are proud graduates of the Texas public school system who have worked in education in and out of Texas for the past decade. We have one question for the state of Texas: Was it worth it?

What is the value of giving children the services they need to be able to read? To learn to connect with their peers? To learn to manage their attentions and emotions to focus in class? To navigate the world outside of the relative comforts and safety afforded by classroom walls? We know that appropriate special education services are linked with higher graduation rates, and in the case of helping children learn to read specifically, lower rates of incarceration and social benefit reliance (both of which carry a significant taxpayer burden).

What is worth taking away the keys to the kingdom of knowledge for students who can’t access it? All of the joy of learning drained from these students’ education experiences — what was the value of what is lost to these students?

The futures that these students are locked out of — what is the value of their lowered earnings? Of their lost potential? Where did those billions of dollars go? Surely, they must have served a greater purpose than serving students like Roanin Walker, who was profiled in this article.

Otherwise, how could we live with ourselves blatantly stealing the futures of our children? Christine Hardigree, assistant professor of Adolescent Literacy, Iona College,

New Rochelle, N.Y. Patricia Monticello Kievlan,

program associate, The Sprout Fund, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Galen L. McQuillen, Advanced Learning Academy, San Antonio

Malpractice

After three years in public school, my granddaughter was lucky to have a whole family that pulled together to send her to a private school specializing in dyslexia. Pulling her out of the regular classroom for a few minutes a week failed to teach her to read, and it will never remove her disability.

Dyslexic children must be taught how to overcome the different ways their brains perceive information. The depression, self-cutting and suicide that children will manifest when they are forced to remain in the regular classroom will cost Texans many millions of dollars in lost productivity throughout the lives of these innocent children.

I have some questions: What is the chain of command? Who can be held accountable for this travesty? This is malpractice of the worst kind. Who hires the people at the TEA? If none of them are elected, who supervises them? Obviously, most of our elected officials were unaware of these harmful practices. In my view, prison is too good for them. Nancy Lomax, Houston