Judge hits DOE over special-needs kids
The city is systematically failing its most medically fragile kids, a judge said Wednesday in blasting the Department of Education.
Special-needs children are forced to stay home for much of the school year — and sometimes longer — because a “cumbersome and counterintuitive bureaucracy” can’t coordinate their nursing and transportation services, Judge William Pauley III wrote in Manhattan.
The federal judge issued his broadside against the DOE and new Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza in a decision ordering that they face a lawsuit on behalf of four severely disabled children.
“The claims in this action arise from a systematic breakdown in DOE’s practices, policies and procedures,” Pauley said.
The DOE had tried on technical grounds to wiggle out of the lawsuit, filed by Greenberg Traurig LLP and Advocates for Children of New York.
While the suit names just four
The claims in this th action arise from fro a systematic breakdown bre in DOE’s practices, pra policies and a procedures. — US District Judge William Pauley III
kids, “We’re claiming that the entire system is broken,” said Daniel Hochbaum of AFCNY.
“I would not want any parent to go through what I went through,” one of the moms suing the DOE told The Post.
Her 8-year-old son, who suffers from severe seizures, missed kindergarten for two years because he never got the “bus nurse” the DOE ordered for him, the suit says.
“I felt completely lost, and I blamed myself for not being able to speak English,” she said through an interpreter.
“Then I realized that the people who were telling me no were not telling me the truth,” she said.
Even when the boy’s nurse and transportation were finally provided, he continued to miss days of school because his bus would show up without enough room for a wheelchair, the judge said.
Another 8-year-old boy, a quadriplegic, survived a “kabuki dance” of paperwork submissions and rejections and missed weeks of school when the DOE’s Office of Pupil Transportation erroneously claimed his wheelchair brakes needed to be “repaired,” the judge said.
The children “require individualized nursing services, transportation to and from school on a specialized bus outfitted to carry a wheelchair, a nurse to accompany them on the bus, and another nurse that is either with or near them in school throughout the day,” the judge’s decision notes.
A DOE spokesman said: “All students deserve a high-quality education, and we are committed to meeting the individual services for nursing and transportation. We are continuing to work diligently to address concerns and meet the needs of students and families.”