East Palo Alto District Ordered To Fix Program

Special ed classes found lacking

See the original article at the San Francisco Chronicle
Carolyne Zinko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, January 5, 2000

Under terms of a federal court settlement, the Ravenswood Elementary School District in East Palo Alto must revamp its special education program to better comply with federal law. The settlement, approved by U.S District Judge Thelton E. Henderson on Monday, calls for student assessments conducted by bilingual workers, training for teachers, placement of disabled students in regular classes and a court-appointed monitor to oversee compliance for at least two years.

The settlement affects the 550 special education pupils in kindergarten through eighth grade and potentially dozens of others who have not been tested, advocates said.

The Ravenswood district, which serves 4,600 students in one of the poorest areas of the Peninsula, was sued in 1996 over allegations that it was violating state and federal laws by no properly assessing and teaching disabled students. The state Department of Education was also named in the suit.

The action was filed by the East Palo Alto Community Law Project, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund in Berkeley and a private law firm. Representatives of the groups characterized the settlement yesterday as historic and unprecedented because it will force the state to change the way it monitors school districts’ compliance with federal education law.

“The state has a responsibility to monitor and fix the problems, and they’ve not been doing that in Ravenswood or other school districts throughout California,” said Diane Lipton, an attorney with the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.

“I’ve worked in special education for 25 years, and the conditions in the Ravenswood district were about the worst I’ve ever seen.”

One first-grader who was tested for hearing was not re-tested again until the seventh grade, when he had fallen behind and suffered a severe hearing loss, the suit charged.

Parents of the disabled told advocates that their children’s hair had been pulled, that they had been pushed and called “stupid” by teachers and that the district did not provide Spanish-speaking psychologists for their children.

Lipton said confidential files on special education students were missing or were piled in heaps in offices. Some had been destroyed in a fire. Spanish-speaking children were put into special education classes with teachers who did not speak Spanish; one girl was promoted to the seventh grade before anyone determined that she was mentally retarded. The district also went without a special education director for long periods of time.

Ravenswood School District Superintendent Charlie Mae Knight dismissed many of the complaints in the lawsuit as unsubstantiated, saying that there was no proof that children had been physically abused and that there were no children who had had their testing delayed for years.

“There was no one with the intent of refusing services to these children,” Knight said. “We have complied with everything that has been requested.”

But she acknowledged some mistakes on the district’s part, such as not keeping records on students, particularly those whose parents refused to put their children into special education programs. She also said the district did not have a bilingual psychologist on staff. She said the district cannot compete with higher salaries offered to bilingual psychologists by other school districts across the state.

“It’s the kind of problem that districts throughout California will have to cope with,” Knight said. “Ravenswood is the first to be tested. If they took the same class action suit to San Francisco, Oakland or South Central L.A., I can tell you, many of us would come up short. It’s not that we’re mean-spirited people. It means California doesn’t fund programs for regular education, let alone one those as complicated and costly as special education.”

Federal law requires that every child receive a “free and equal public education” regardless of disability. Meeting this requirement, school officials say, means an enormous expenditure of money and resources because every child identified as needing special education is entitled to an “individualized education plan.”