A Landmark Lawsuit Aimed to Fix Special Ed for California's Black Students. It Didn’t.

"My dream is to be able to pick up a book and read it by myself."Darryl Lester, lead plaintiff in landmark special education lawsuit in California



"The letter delivered good news: Lester would be getting disability benefits after blowing out his back in a sheet metal accident. But he crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.
Why? Because he couldn’t read it. From first through seventh grades, Lester had attended three public schools in San Francisco. At each, he struggled with reading and didn’t get the help he needed for it."


"Whether Lester has dyslexia is unclear. What is clear is that instead of getting help with his reading, he got teased, into fights and suspended. “I would get frustrated, agitated, upset, and then I’d get sent to the principal's office,” he said.


"Lester’s mom, Lucille Lester, didn’t learn that the school district had labeled her son “mentally retarded” until one of the black psychologists visited their home to evaluate Darryl and go through some tests.
“After he talked to Darryl, he turns to me and says, ‘Well, there is nothing wrong with this child,” she testified in court in 1977."




Read complete story here.

Squaring State Child Vaccine Policy With Individual Rights Under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act: Questions Raised in California

Parents should closely examine the new WA state vaccine requirements and how it may be possible for school districts to revoke your child's IEP over failure to meet the school district's vaccination  requirements.

"Districts may interpret the parent's refusal to vaccinate as a consent to exit an IEP and revoke services"

" The district must give advanced notice to parents informing them of the possibility that their actions will result in revocation of services .Parents must be afforded a reasonable amount of time for parents to fully consider the consequences before schools discontinue special education and related services.2"

Read the full discussion here

Please Vote for Liza Rankin

  UPDATE 10/18/2021....boy was I wrong. Please don't run again Liza.

Liza reached out to those of us advocating for special education and then spent the afternoon listening to the parents', teachers' and advocates' issues. Liza is the only candidate running who organized a meeting for special education and that's an important tell.

I honestly believe that Liza will work to improve the education experience for all students .

For over 14 years parents special education issues have fallen on deaf ears, Liza will listen and work to address your concerns.

Vote for Liza Rankin -Seattle School Board    http://elizasrankin.com/
Endorsement for Liza

Box of Shame Makes a Comeback in Seattle Public Schools

In the late spring of 2019 a Whitman Middle School student asked me to watch a video she had taken in her math class. The video showed a 3x3 square made of tape located on the classroom floor.

The square had written on it "Box of Shame".

The student was upset because the teacher was forcing students who the teacher thought were disengaged to sit on the floor in the Box of Shame for the remainder of class. The student described how the teacher would ridicule any student forced to sit in the box and said all the other students were embarrassed that they did not stop the teacher from abusing the students. Most of the students forced to sit in the Box of Shame have IEP's and are in the class to learn math not to be humiliated.

On June 6, 2019 I emailed the district and reported the abuse. The regional supervisor responded as asked if he could view the video.

I sent him a link to my cloud storage,

https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZMNkN7Z9vA63VIfHw8pyry42YhMrymgobty.


As you will see in the emails that the School Board Director for District 1 did not bother to engage.
The abusive teacher used the tried and true "it was a joke" lie and the district very quickly circled the wagons to protect the teacher and principle who was made aware of the practice months earlier.

Is it worth the paper it's written on?

Who really chooses the Seattle Times Education lab stories?

Education Lab is a Seattle Times project that spotlights promising approaches to persistent challenges in public education. It is produced in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network and is funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Amazon and City University of Seattle.

The Times ran a story on Monday 9/9/2019 about teachers quitting a private religious school  over policy differences. The Times published the story in the Education lab section. This seems strange because it clearly states that the education lab is a project that spotlights public education. The school in the one sided hit piece article is a private religious school in Shoreline. I wanted to find out if the sponsors condoned the anti-christian comments that the Seattle Times moderators allowed to appear in the comment section. These comments contained threats against the school staff, threats against the students and threats against the companies that have donated to the school.

I first spoke to the Gates Foundation and was told that they did not write or suggest the religious school story. They confirmed they do submit stories and stories ideas that they want published in the Times in the Education Lab section.

Next, I spoke with City University which conformed that they did not sponsor the article nor did they want their name associated with the article and they only sponsor stories they submit.

Amazon has yet to return my phone call.

Given the tendencies of violence by various social justice groups it was reckless of the Times to publish this story. Any incident of violence against the school's property, students or staff will be the responsibility of the Seattle Times.

Seattle School Board Distrct 1 candidate's pages.

Christophersen - district 1 link

Thank you for your votes. We didn't make it to November but we are going to continue to fight for students and tax payers. Please check back for new post and great information. We will be making our recommendations for Novembers election sometime in September.

Kline - district 1 link

Where's the Seattle Public Schools funding going?

                                          Seattle Public schools budget process.  

The Strange Case of USDE OCR and Seattle Public Schools.

The United State Dept of Education recently released a new statement:

 

“From day one, our approach has been clear and unwavering: vigorously enforce civil rights laws, treat students as individuals, and resolve cases both efficiently and effectively,” said Secretary DeVos. “The backlog of cases we inherited should have troubled everyone, as we know justice delayed is justice denied. While many have tried to distort the nature of our approach, the numbers don’t lie. Our approach has been more effective at supporting students and delivering meaningful results.”

 See full statement

How is this statement relevant to Seattle Public schools?

Seattle Public Schools - Special education funding conundrum

From reading this blog you should be able to infer that we are interested in education with an emphasis on Specific Leaning Disabilities (SLD), which includes dyslexia. We believe that if the district would use better methodologies and curriculum designed to mainstream dyslexic students then that effort would result in better outcomes for students along will significant cost savings.  Freeing those funds to use elsewhere.

We are pleased to see the following statement on the SPS website:

Special Areas of Attention

 

"Special Education: The state’s Special Education budget increase is a down payment on a much-needed long term solution. Next year, Seattle Public Schools will receive an additional 2 million dollars for special education. Annually, the district spends 70 million dollars of local levy funds to provide the services our students need. While we appreciate the increase for Special Education, we continue to have grave concerns about the State’s slow pace in fully funding Special Education as is required by law."

 source :  https://www.seattleschools.org/district/calendars/news/what_s_new/budget_update_for_2019-20

However, I have great concerns that SPS would not use all the funding for special education or would not use the additional funding properly.  More on that in a future post!

SPS provides little to no explanation on what they would do with more funding, they just continue to blame the poor academic outcomes of SPED students on lack of funding. It's not a funding issue that's for sure.

Here's the break down and remember these number do not include the general education funding that is allocated on top off the special educational funding. This is only the available SPED funding data.