Apr 10, 2008 5:01 PM
The State Education Department has upheld charges the UFT brought to it of widespread failure by the New York City school system to provide school staff with copies of the IEPs of children they are responsible for and has directed the city Department of Education to notify principals of their legal obligation to do so.
A union survey last fall found 415 schools that were not providing copies of Individualized Education Programs to all general education teachers, special education teachers and related service providers responsible for implementing the IEPs and 549 schools where paraprofessionals did not have access to the IEPs of the special education students they work with.
The state findings fully support the UFT’s charges that the DOE was not in compliance with Chapter 408 of the Education Law, which mandates that all staff members responsible for the implementation of a student’s IEP be “provided a paper or electronic copy of the IEP prior to the implementation of the IEP.”
“If I don’t know the needs of my students how do I meet those needs?” asked Chapter Leader and ESL teacher Katie Kurjakovic of PS 11, Queens. “Our special students see several teachers every day and they deserve to get the appropriate services they need from each teacher and not just from their classroom teacher,” she added. “So we all need copies of their IEPs.”
Special education teacher Erinetta Long, of PS 110 in the Bronx, spoke of the growing number of students with severe behavior problems in her school and the consequences when general education teachers who don’t know the problems begin to work with these students. She said that in order to be effective, these teachers needed their own copies of the IEPs, not just to know that they were available somewhere in the school. “Teachers need copies of IEPs, not just access to them,” she said.
The city press has picked up on the story. In a March 28 Daily News article, Kim Sweet of Advocates for Children described the IEP as a road map and said, “If you don’t give a teacher a road map, then the teacher is driving blind.”
The article also quoted Maryanne Schatz, a parent with an autistic son at PS 58 in Queens, who explained that “if the general education teacher doesn’t have her hands on his IEP, she doesn’t know what his weaknesses are. She doesn’t have an understanding.”
In response to the UFT charges that the violations are systemic and ongoing, the state followed up with its own survey and found that in approximately 57 percent of a 100 schools sampled — schools identified by the union — appropriate staff members were not provided a copy of students’ IEPs and in 12 percent of those schools paraprofessionals did not have access to the IEPs of their special education students.
The State Education Department agreed to the union’s proposed resolution of the violations and directed that:
UFT district representatives, working in conjunction with UFT Staff Director LeRoy Barr and UFT Vice President for Special Education Carmen Alvarez,