Student with autism fails to get evaluation for six years
TRENTON >> The horror stories of the capital city’s treatment of students with special needs are not going away anytime soon.
On Saturday, the district was hit with yet another New Jersey Department of Education (DOE) complaint for failing to re-evaluate a student with autism in a required time frame. The student, who enrolled at Trenton Public Schools in March 2014, was last evaluated six years ago at a previous district when he was 5, the complaint indicates.
“Due to this, I do not believe the school has up to date information to service my son,” parent Lenora Cheston said in a March 18 letter attached to the complaint. “This has also caused a great deal of stress as he is not able to qualify for (New Jersey Division of Developmental Disabilities) services.”
Cheston initially asked for an evaluation on her son, who attends Mercer Elementary School as an out-of-district placement, in May 2016. Her son was diagnosed with autism by a neural developmental pediatrician at 3 years old, according to the letter she sent to the district at the time.
“As I indicated to you at our IEP meeting on May 4th, we will require an updated Neurological or Psychiatric indicating (the student’s) eligibility to be classified as Autistic, prior to the Team completing other evaluations,” a teacher responded to Cheston in May 2016, noting a re-evaluation would be completed as soon as possible. “Unfortunately, we do not have these professionals available.”
To date, no re-evaluation of the autistic student has been completed, even though the district has 60 to 90 days to complete one after the initial request, the complaint states.
Trenton Public Schools laid off all of its speech, occupational, physical and psychological therapists last year due to budget cuts. Nicole Whitfield, of the Special Parent Advocacy Group, told The Trenton ian on Wednesday that the layoffs are the main reason the district is so far behind in performing re-evaluations.
“The therapists used to do the caseloads, plus do the evaluations,” said Whitfield, whose agency filed the complaint .“But now that they laid off all the therapists, they outsourced them to some company and they can barely handle the caseloads so there’s nobody to do evaluations.”
Whitfield said it has created a domino effect of problems for the district, leading to compliance issues for Individualized Education Programs (IEP), which is a legal plan schools must abide by to meet the need sofa special education student.
First, the district is failing to complete initial evaluations in 60 to 90 days when a student enrolls in the district, Whitfield said.
“If there’s nobody to do the evaluations, then how are the kids getting the assistance that they need,” Whitfield said. “They can’t get the IEP without the evaluation.”
By law, Whitfield said, students are then required to be re-evaluated every three years after the initial evaluation, which the district is also failing to meet.
“How can you work with a child if you don’t have up-todate data?” Whitfield questioned, noting an IEP then cannot be properly updated since a re-evaluation was not performed. “The goals and the objectives are all a part of the evaluation so it’s a domino effect.”
Furthermore, it causes a problem when the student applies for outside services as seen in the autistic student’s case, Whitfield said.
“They’re not able to get what they need on the outside because they require the evaluations to be done within three years,” the advocate said. “So if the parent gives them old evaluations, they’re pushing the application back to the parent saying, ‘We’re not going to approve it because you need to get up-todate evaluations.’”
The district has also failed to keep its word with mediation agreements for students with special needs, according to the DOE complaint.
In another case, district officials agreed to six actions in November 2016 following mediation, but has failed to complete four of them, such as providing social skills training to the student, convening an IEP meeting, amending the IEP and providing daily communications to the parent.
District officials, on the other hand, try to paint a rosier picture of the special education issues.
At the school board’s meeting on Feb. 27, Elizabeth DeJesus, who is assistant superintendent of special services, reported that the district went from being out of compliance in special education from 28 areas to three, meeting minutes show. After initially vowing to be 100 percent compliant by March, the district has now moved that timeline until May, DeJesus indicated.
Whitfield said the information that is being provided to the board is “not true.”
“They’re basically giving alternative facts before the board and then the board is just clapping,” Whitfield said. “It’s gotten worse. I’ve never seen it this bad. They’re at least a year and a half behind on evaluations and new referrals. There’s nobody to do evaluations.”
In order to rectify the problem, Whitfield said the district must hire professionals to complete the evaluations.
“A systemic violations such as this cannot be remedied by having dialogue with the district,” the complaint states. “They must be forced to legally service our students.”
District officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Since last year, SPAG has filed several complaints against the district, including one with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) for discrimination due to the district’s inability to provide required staffing to students with special needs.