Jun 29, 2009 12:16 PM
The UFT’s There Is No Excuse campaign is turning a spotlight on special education violations citywide.
With nearly 1,000 complaint forms returned to the UFT and analyzed, a picture is emerging of flagrant, systemic and chronic violations of the state’s special education law by school administrators who deny needed services to special needs students.
The Bronx, say figures released by the UFT’s special education department, registered 333 complaints, the most for any borough. Staten Island’s 91 complaints — from its one district and its share of District 75 students — was proportionately high, too, the product of intense involvement by the borough’s parents in the campaign.
The single most frequent complaint, with 219 examples reported, involved the absence of required related services, which in effect starves special-needs students of the targeted attention they must have to succeed. While a child’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) may have mandated that the school offer speech, occupational therapy, or even counseling, many principals stood accused of denying these.
The campaign has paid dividends in some cases, however.
For instance, one Special Education Teacher Support Services (SETSS) teacher in the Bronx complained of mandated services being canceled because he was often required to cover a class or proctor an exam — a common complaint of SETSS teachers across the city.
“This has been going on since September,” said the SETSS teacher, noting that he has had to “proctor exams and practice tests for students who are not part of my caseload.”
After being informed by the UFT of the violation, the Department of Education told the principal to end the practice, and the member confirmed that “so far I am no longer being pulled. Thank you once again for your help.”
Other often-voiced complaints dealt with a shortage of paraprofessionals offering needed support services (209 cases cited) and the failure to meet special class requirements (200 cases). The latter category included schools operating with no self-contained classrooms despite special education students at the schools needing them; placing students in self-contained or collaborative team teaching (CTT) settings who have more than a 36-month spread in age or functional levels in math and reading among them; or running self-contained classes of more than 12 special education students without a proper waiver from the state.
Complaints about violations of CTT rules (184 cases) were also common. Here, where classes are to be taught in tandem by both a licensed special education teacher and a licensed general education teacher, it was found that classes were led by two general education teachers, if not by just one.
And where CTT classes were to have no more than 12 students with IEPs, representing no more than 40 percent of the class, these thresholds were frequently ignored.
Principals were often guilty of creating more team teaching classes to serve students with special needs, often as a cost-cutting measure, when in fact their IEPs called for individualized “pull-out” services.
“The law says ‘individualized education program,’ not ‘principals to save money program,’” said Carmen Alvarez, UFT vice president for special education and “No Excuse” campaign coordinator.
In addition, there were 92 cases of teachers not given copies of the IEPs of their students, as is required.
There were also 81 cases of schools not following IEP mandates and 128 cases of IEP teams meeting without the appropriate members present. In numerous cases, individuals who did not attend the meeting were pressured to sign statements saying they had.
Fifty-one complaints dealt with teachers hindered in making special services referrals, and 116 cases were found of discipline suspensions applied to special needs students, ranging from inappropriate use of discipline procedures to have students removed from the building to failure to use the procedure when called for.
A combined 68 complaints were filed reporting a lack of ESL instruction or bilingual program services.
“This campaign isn’t over,” Alvarez said. “Children are being cheated. Our students and their families are not getting the services they are lawfully required to get.”
Alvarez said the union was using the information it had gathered to press the DOE to ensure that special education students are provided the services that they need.
The UFT will continue collecting complaints throughout the summer and fall.