Educators secretly remove students with disabilities
ROSEBURG, ORE. — Jessica Lavigne was nervous but hopeful on a recent afternoon that the team managing her son’s education plan at Roseburg High School would tell her something she had dreamed of for more than a decade: He would be able to attend a full day of school for the first time since second grade.
During her son’s elementary years, Lavigne was called almost daily to pick him up hours early because he was having “a bad day.” By middle school, he was only attending an hour a day. By high school, he was told he had to “earn” back two class periods taken off his schedule by proving he was academically and socially ready.
As she and her son, Dakotah, 15, entered the school for the meeting, Lavigne, 37, a banquet server at a local casino, felt she had run out of time. “I used to want him to go to college, but now I just want him to live a normal life in society,” she had said earlier. “If he doesn’t go to school, I don’t know how that can happen.”
Dakotah’s tumultuous educational journey has been marked by a series of tactics, known as informal removals, that schools secretly and sometimes illegally use to remove challenging students with disabilities from class. The removals — which can include repeated dismissals in the middle of the day or shortening students’ education to a few hours a week — are often in violation of federal civil rights protections for those with disabilities.
In a report last year, the National Disability Rights Network, a national nonprofit established by Congress more than four decades ago, found informal removals occurring hundreds and perhaps thousands of times per year as “off-the-book suspensions.” The report said the removals also included “transfers to nowhere,” when students are involuntarily sent to programs that do not exist.
The removals largely escape scrutiny because schools are not required to report them in the same manner as formal suspensions and expulsions, making them difficult to track and their effect hard to measure.
But interviews with families, educators and experts — as well as a New York Times review of school emails, special education records and other documents — suggest that informal removals are pernicious practices that harm some of the nation’s most vulnerable children. Students are left academically stifled and socially marginalized. Their families often end up demoralized and desperate.
Educators say informal removals underscore how they struggle to comply with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act and related legislation that began requiring schools to educate students with disabilities nearly 50 years ago. Federal funding to help schools cover the extra costs of special education has always fallen short of the targets in the law, leaving many without the resources they say they need.
The Education Department warned schools in the summer that informal removals could violate federal civil rights laws. The year before, the Justice Department reached a settlement with Lewiston Public Schools in Maine after the department found that the district had violated the civil rights of students with disabilities without “considering their individual needs or exploring supports to keep them in school for the full day.”
Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, said schools were often unaware of how such practices could infringe students’ civil rights.
In October, federal lawmakers called for the department to specifically include informal removals as a type of prohibited discrimination in revisions to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the landmark disability civil rights law.
Dakotah’s journey
Dakotah was diagnosed as a preschooler with Chromosome 4q deletion, a rare genetic disorder that affected his vision, speech, and cognitive and fine motor skills. But with minimal exceptions like a nasal voice and developmental delays, he appeared like any other child.
Things started to go awry in second grade. “His behavior gets in the way of his learning daily,” a progress report noted. “He laughs, thinks things are silly and often doesn’t respond to teachers and peers. He has more ability than he shows.”
In an interview at his grandparents’ house, Dakotah said he stopped liking school that year. He said he spent hours away from his classmates in a “safe room” because of his outbursts, which he said happened when he had to do classwork that was too hard, with no help.
“They started doing this to me,” he said, as he wrapped his arms tightly around himself and squeezed, imitating being restrained.
The disciplinary reports started to pile up in third grade, including one reporting that Dakotah had picked up a classmate and hugged him so hard that the classmate cried out in pain. He bounced around districts.
By middle school, he was attending class only one hour a day and was performing at a kindergarten level. School officials said he had bitten through a classmate’s shoe, made “rude finger gestures” and engaged in other behavior that made him unfit for a general education classroom.
A new school
Dakotah was cautiously optimistic as he headed with his mother at the end of the school day into the meeting at Roseburg High. If his team determined he could attend for a full day, he said, “it’ll be like going to school for the first time.”
On Dec. 5, Dakotah started a full day at Roseburg. He spent most of the mornings helping out in the office. But he was there, finally, at the same start time as his peers.
But in early January Lavigne received a familiar phone call. A school principal reported that Dakotah had an altercation with his aide and an assistant principal after being called “a little boy” and was placed in a seclusion room to settle down. He was bound for an in-school suspension.
Something in Lavigne finally snapped. She told the school she would come get Dakotah and he would not return.
This time it was school administrators on the other end pleading and protesting, expressing how much they liked Dakotah and that Roseburg was where he belonged.
But it was too late. Lavigne picked up her son and pulled away from the school, heartbroken.
Jill Weber, the Roseburg High School principal, declined to comment on Dakotah because of privacy laws but said in a statement that “my staff and I care deeply about every single student.”
Last month, Dakotah started in a new school district. So far he has attended a full day without issue.
This month, Lavigne, now connected with a group of attorneys, testified to the Oregon Legislature in support of a bill that would limit the use of abbreviated school days in the state. It is one of several efforts in Oregon, including a closely watched class-action lawsuit, to curb or eliminate the practice.