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 

 

DRA filed a class action lawsuit against the New York City Department of Education (“DOE”)

"
On July 27, 2017, DRA filed a class action lawsuit against the New York City Department of Education (“DOE”), the City of New York, and DOE Chancellor Carmen Fariña, in her official capacity, alleging violations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and other anti-discrimination laws on behalf of a class of students with disabilities who attend school in the Bronx and are being denied legally-mandated special education services.
If the New York City Department of Education cannot find providers for related services that a student with a disability needs like occupational therapy or speech therapy, it issues a “voucher” to parents instead called Related Service Authorizations or RSAs. While typically these services would be provided during the school day, the families of children receiving these vouchers are left to fend for themselves, often facing insurmountable obstacles related to limited transportation options, inflexible work schedules, and language barriers. These vouchers go unused at very high rates. In the Bronx, over 63% of the vouchers are not used. The rates of usage are not much better across the City generally as almost half of the over 9,000 vouchers issued in the 2015-2016 school year went unused.
DRA’s goal in this case is to ensure that the DOE develops and implements a remedial plan that includes new practices, policies, and procedures to ensure that all students in the Plaintiff Class receive their related services."


http://dralegal.org/case/m-g-et-al-v-new-york-city-department-education-et-al/

Report: Washington’s dropout rate is high for students with learning disabilities

 "According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, 35 percent of Washington’s 147,000 Special Education students drop out of high school, a rate among the highest of the 40 states studied."

“It could be that teachers are not well trained to recognize or support kids with learning issues, or that they maintain lower expectations for those students,” said Sheldon Horowitz, an author of the report.



http://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/report-washingtons-dropout-rate-is-high-for-students-with-learning-disabilities/

"I'll Call a Civics Strike!" Tucker and Actor Richard Dreyfuss Discuss C...

"I have withdrawn from partisan politics. I am a constitutionalist who believes that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be central and the parties must be peripheral. What’s most important for me is what you just mentioned haphazardly, we are over 30. Civics has not been taught in the American public school system since 1970. And that means everyone in Congress never studied the constitution and the bill of rights as you and I might have.
And that is a critical flaw because it’s why we were admired and respected for so long, it gives us our national identity, it tells the world who we are and why we are who we are, and without a frame that gives us values that stand behind the bill of rights, we’re just floating in the air and our sectors of society are not connected.
What’s really important is that the assumptions of the left and the right are all skewed wrong. We have t find areas of agreement and areas that we share. And we do share the notion that education accomplishes certain things. One, it turns students into citizens. And, two, it teaches students how to run the country before it’s their turn to run the country. And, three, it teaches the values of this nation.
People come from all over the world or are born into this nation without the values that we have here. That’s why they came here, to get them. And what are they? You can put them in opportunity, rise by merit, mobility, and freedom. That’s what we sell. And if you don’t want that, you’ve chosen the wrong place. And you don’t get a pass by being born here, you have to learn it. Even the Ten Commandments are not known at birth. You must learn them. And we must learn our values and if we don’t, we are fatally, fatally wounding ourselves. We will not have any way to really combat the ideas behind ISIS because we won’t know our own. And we have to."
 -Richard Dreyfuss
 

Why Special Needs Students Want School Choice

Thomas Sowell - Tough Teachers

Thomas Sowell - The Path To Better Schools

Milton Friedman on School Choice

John Stossel and Betsy Devos - Why Not School Choice?

Why Teachers Unions Don't Want School Choice