The DC Court of Appeals
issued a decisive decision last week in the case: Boose v. District of
Columbia. The Court of Appeals determined that the violations of the
IDEA's "child find" requirements, or the failure to offer a student an
Individualized Education Program (IEP) and if that failure affects a
student's education then that student has been denied a free appropriate
public education (FAPE). Furthermore, the Court delineated the
responsibility to rectify that denial with compensatory education:
"And
when a school district denies a child a FAPE, the courts have “broad
discretion” to fashion an appropriate remedy. See Florence County School
District Four v. Carter, 510 U.S. 7, 15–16 (1993). That equitable
authority, this court has held, must include the power to order
“compensatory education”—that is, education services designed to make up
for past deficiencies in a child’s program. Reid ex rel. Reid v.
District of Columbia, 401 F.3d 516, 522–23 (D.C. Cir. 2005). If
compensatory education were unavailable, after all, a child’s access to
appropriate education could depend on his parents’ ability to pull him
out of the deficient public program and front the cost of private
instruction—a result “manifestly incompatible with IDEA’s purpose of
‘ensur[ing] that all children with disabilities have available to them a
free appropriate public education.’” Id. at 522–23 (quoting 20 U.S.C. §
1400(d)(1)(A)); see also School Committee of the Town of Burlington,
Massachusetts v. Department of Education of Massachusetts, 471 U.S. 359
(1985) (compelling reimbursement for private instruction to avoid the
same harm). Worse yet, “students who remained in public school [without
an appropriate plan] would lack any effective redress for FAPE denials,
even those extending over many years.” Reid, 410 F.3d at 523. To be
sure, such students could seek a satisfactory IEP. But because the
Supreme Court has held that IEPs need do no more than provide “some
educational benefit” going forward, Board of Education of the Hendrick
Hudson Central School District, Westchester County v. Rowley, 458 U.S.
176, 200 (1982), an education plan conforming to that standard will
speak only to “the child’s present abilities,” Reid, 401 F.3d at 523.
Unlike compensatory education, therefore, an IEP “carries no guarantee
of undoing damage done by prior violations,” id., and that plan alone
cannot take the place of adequate compensatory education."
No comments:
Post a Comment