Seattle school board Director Jill Geary opens up about IEP violations.

I have to say I just about fell out of my chair when watching the February 27th Seattle school board public meeting. First off, during the public testimony portion a parent Anne Sheeran gave powerful testimony outlining the ongoing discrimination against 2E students and the invisibility of Special Education student's, their realities and the effects the proposed Policy 2024 regarding online learning.

I expected little to no response from any of the board members since for the last 3 years they have said little about the subject but then towards the end at of the meeting Director Jill Geary made the following statement,

"It is really important to me that we as a district offer specially designed instruction as part of our special education.  And I fear that too much of what we offer is an accommodation and that accommodation is more time which puts students who are in special ed farther and farther and farther behind in any type of challenging curriculum and so it’s really important that if we are going to offer challenging curriculum we make sure that our special education teachers have the time to modify the curriculum to the point that it serves the students and I heard today that we are not doing that, so from my perspective I don’t want to make any legal conclusions but it seems to be a problem. So I would hope that we have someone who is working diligently on that. It’s not like the curriculum is a surprise, it’s not like the accommodations around getting to core concepts and reducing volume is something we would have to do for every single student individually necessarily that is something that should just be done and here’s the point that I think I’d like to make, before we buy that curriculum from somebody we should be asking the question about whether or not they offer it done. Because if we’re doing it for one student it has been done for thousands of students across this country. So why is that not part of what we are talking about when we buy into, these people get a lot of money for the test that we have our kids do. So please lets be more savvy in terms of negotiating on behave of our students. Perhaps we don’t have the resources, but they’re taking our money , they can use that money to do that".     

Jill Geary,  (2019, February 27). Seattle school board public meeting.

https://youtu.be/oif7By_Srsw?list=PL4qDca8XEC4NIaRJ27inlNvSeUaS33Aso