Addressing the Issues for Our Children

Many residents in Cherry Hill have decided to begin a letter writing campaign to address the myriad of difficulties that families face in educating our children with special needs. I will be sharing letters from those residents over the next few weeks. To have your letter posted, please email me at: kathimagee@verizon.net

The first letter that I have posted (see below) was sent to the Board of Education by two very concerned parents, Greg Blackburn and Kyra Smith.

Dear Board Members,

Now that the election for the Cherry Hill Board of Education is over, we are once again writing to raise our concerns regarding the provision of special education services within the Cherry Hill School District and the manner in which the district’s Special Education Department conducts its affairs. This issue was raised time and again by all of the candidates during the election. The winning candidates also talked extensively about seeking input from all concerned. In this spirit we offer the following comments:

Cherry Hill ’s Special Education Department and the services it provides are in crisis for many reasons, the most serious of which we have enumerated below:

1) Students are not receiving related services as outlined in their Individual Education Plan document (IEP). In addition to failing to provide needed therapies, which has already been heavily mentioned in the past, another example of the district’s lack of compliance is that full participation in extra-curricular and non-academic activities is often guarantee in the IEP document, yet the district routinely fails to honor this guarantee or develop a plan for each student that details, the “how”, “when” and “where” to ensure a child’s participation in these activities. By failing to provide the necessary aids, modifications, and supports to ensure this participation, the district violates federal and New Jersey law, which state that the district must ensure that each child receiving special education be educated in the “least restrictive environment” and with as much exposure to their non-disabled peers as possible.

2) IEP plans are legally deficient for many reasons, including vague and immeasurable goals that make a child’s progress or lack of progress impossible to track, and services that are not uniquely tailored to each child’s strengths, needs and abilities as required by law.

3) The Child Study Team fails to take parental input into consideration when making decisions, and key decisions, including placement decisions, are frequently pre-determined before the IEP meeting. Again, this is a breach of state and federal law, which underscores the importance of parental participation and the need for IEP team members, including parents, to reach consensus at IEP meetings.

4) The Cherry Hill school district frequently sends district representatives to IEP meetings who are not empowered to commit district resources and therefore are “lame ducks” with no real authority to make decisions on behalf of a child. Further, district administrators routinely exercise “veto power” over decisions made by the IEP team during IEP meetings. Per federal and state law, district representatives attending IEP meetings, as well as the IEP team as a whole (including parents) should be empowered to make decisions, and school administrators who fail to attend IEP meetings are disallowed from rejecting IEP team decisions made in good faith.

5) Although parents have broad discretion to invite anyone to their children’s IEP meetings, Cherry Hill school district routinely prevents certain individuals, especially therapists and classroom assistants, from attending IEP meetings. This behavior most certainly violates the spirit of federal and state special education law. Parents frequently hear excuses from case managers including, “this person is not a certified therapist and he/she cannot make recommendations to the IEP team.” Per state and federal l aw , anyone attending an IEP meeting can make a recommendation! Another excuse being used is that the assistant or therapist “has a very busy schedule and will not be available on the day of the IEP.” Most troubling is that parents recently learned that the district is instructing certain individuals to tell parents that “I’ll have to check my schedule” after parents invite them to the IEP meeting. Unsurprisingly, these individuals always have a “schedule conflict” that prevents them from attending the meeting!

6) Instructional assistants, who often work extremely closely with special-needs children in the district and are in an excellent position to engage in meaningful dialogue with parents, have been told by the district that they are not to discuss a student’s education with parents. Apparently this is “a human resources policy” within the Cherry Hill school district.

7) Lack of communication by district administration is an enormous problem, and exemplifies the dismissive and uncooperative attitude of the Special Education Department towards its students and their families. Parents who raise any type of concern are immediately labeled as “difficult” and, if they are lucky enough to be responded to at all, are responded to in a condescending and evasive manner. If parents continue to raise concerns they are eventually ignored altogether, leaving them with the sole recourse of exercising their due process rights and filing a compliance complaint or filing for mediation and/or a fair hearing. The mediation and hearing process is extremely time-consuming and expensive, both for parents as well as for the district.

Sadly, it is Cherry Hill ’s already overstretched taxpayers who ultimately bear the costs of the district’s misdeeds and failure to communicate, in the form of costly district attorneys who prolong the resolution process for even the simplest matters. The leadership of the Special Education Department routinely ignores emails and telephone calls and only grudgingly and evasively answers questions at public meetings. It has become obvious to parents, and to the public at large, that they refuse to take ownership of any of the issues that have been raised over the last year. Responsibility for the “Quiet Room” incident and the problems that led to the termination of the vocational Shop-West Program has been placed on the local principals. Does the Special Education Department bear no responsibility for these problems? If not, why does this department require no less than four high-level administrators to conduct its day-to-day affairs?

This leaves our family and many others asking, what does the leadership of the Cherry Hill School District’s Special Education Department actually do? We see no willingness to admit to the problems this district is facing and work with parents and staff to build better programs. It is incredible that the Board of Education recently voted to add yet another special education administrator to this already ineffectual and top-heavy department, while simultaneously maintaining that the district cannot afford to pay the current market rates for therapists providing critical services to our children.

One could point to the recently state-ordered “self-assessment” as a “step in the right direction.” Given the manner in which the district controls communication, disregards parental input and (at the very least) seems to prefer to operate in the murky margins of special education law, can anyone really believe that the leadership f this department is going to allow an authentic self-assessment report to go to the Department of Education? A comprehensive report that includes the unedited comments of parents, and addresses the true level of non-compliance plaguing this district?

An honest self-assessment would be a damning document that catalogs the gross mismanagement of the Special Education Department. Such mismanagement is responsible for the routine violations of federal and state laws outlined above, and has fostered a general attitude of disregard for the legal and educational rights of the students that the district is responsible for educating. Additionally, a true assessment would make mention of the atmosphere of fear and retaliation that many staff members and parents are forced to operate under, and the complete disregard of any parental input in the IEP process. Instead, we fear that the actual self-assessment produced will be a heavily diluted, redacted and deceptive document that won’t address what is genuinely happening in the Cherry Hill Special Education Department. Once again, an opportunity to genuinely improve will be lost due to the fragile egos and personal agendas of district leadership.

The fact remains that the district administration in general, and the leadership of the Special Education Department in particular, operate from an entrenched defensive position and choose to automatically deny that any concerns raised or criticism issued has any basis in truth. Rather than embracing parental concerns and welcoming a movement for positive change, the current administration would rather spend valuable time offering point-by-point rebuttals to letters sent by concerned parents, or worse, waste taxpayer money by hiding behind attorneys who delight in protracting the resolution process.

Greg Blackburn and Kyra Smith