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tion,” they are required to find a
program elsewhere — whether in
another public school district or
in nearby private schools — and
pay for the student to participate.
While IDEA expanded schooling
for a few hundred thousand students, it also set up a system that,
by its nature, can quickly become
litigious and contentious for parents and school districts. “Conflict is inherent in this scenario,”
said Candace Cortiella, a disabilities rights advocate at the D.C.-area Advocacy Institute, which aims
to help people with disabilities.
Parents might believe their child
needs certain services to accomplish his or her IEP, but special
needs advocates say school districts often push for less. Under
IDEA, districts are not allowed to
make decisions based on costs, but
the law allows them to take cost
into consideration when assessing different “configurations” of
the same services. With IDEA so
severely underfunded, this process
has long strained parents’ relationships with school districts. And
over the past few years, as schools
have had to cut their budgets during the recession, some say the situation has worsened. With the fate
of sequestration cuts still uncer-
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tain, IDEA is losing $600 million
this year, paving the way for greater
tension in future negotiations.
It is these factors that lead parents like Maya to conclude that
“the deck is stacked against us.”
For decades, Washington, D.C.,
was particularly negligent. In
1995, parents of students with
disabilities filed two class-action
“It’s pathetic. We’re
witnessing a gut job on
accountability for
special education kids.”
lawsuits against DCPS, claiming
that the district endangered their
children’s right to schooling under
IDEA by not paying their private
school tuition on time. The resulting federal court injunction, the
Petties decision, required that D.C.
implement hearing decisions in a
“timely manner,” and gave a federal court supervision over D.C.’s
special education transportation
program. (A judge dismissed the
case in December 2012.)
“A lot of parents started bringing due process cases against
them,” Cortiella recalls. “Parents were just winning these private placements on procedural
grounds, simply because the