Please ... no more favors

More information on legislative issues here.

The following  letter had many signatures from many parents representing districts all over the state.

For privacy reasons, the redacted version is posted below.

September 3, 2008

Mr. Jeffrey Miller

Advocacy Inc.

7800 Shoal Creek Blvd. Ste. 171-E

Austin, TX 78757

Re: Senate Testimony on August 18, 2008

Dear Mr. Miller,

            Thank you for taking the time to testify before the Senate Education Committee on August 18^th to share Advocacy Inc.’s point of view on the problems with the special education system in Texas. While some of your suggestions for improvements may be potentially helpful, we are compelled to let you know that as parents of special education students in Texas, we are deeply disappointed by your underlying testimony that left the unmistakable impression that Advocacy Inc. believes that what lies at the heart of the problem is parents who are uninformed, misguided and unreasonable.

             You introduced yourself by informing the Committee that, in addition to your work as an attorney, you are also the parent of a child who has been in special education for the last five years and, as a result, you believe you have experienced “just about anything that the special education system has to offer.” Your subsequent testimony, however, reflects that you are completely disconnected from the realities faced by most Texas parents navigating the special education system (who do not enjoy the leverage that comes from working as an attorney for the state protection and advocacy agency.) Instead, your testimony implicated parents as a primary source of the problems we encounter, summarizing the situation with the following statement:

“The IDEA works…what happens is that parents perceive a bias in the system, parents believe that the system is stacked against them, that districts that have an unlimited supply of money and time are able to control the process and they believe that the districts also control access to the records and have access to attorneys that they don't have, and all those sorts of things, and so I think that this PERCEPTION becomes reality for lots of parents. And so what happens is that parents become frustrated, and instead of trying to work through the system, they either give up or they withdraw their children from public school… or they try to go through a system that they don't understand or aren't equipped to handle, and don't have a very favorable result."

 

            This portrayal is absolutely shocking coming from our federally-funded protection and advocacy agency. We do not perceive a bias in the system; the system is inherently structured to give districts ultimate control and autonomy, with the exception of the dispute resolution process. When this process does not work, as you testified it does not, and our Texas courts do not enforce the IDEA, this bias is nothing less than paralyzing. We do not believe that districts control our access to records, and have access to attorneys and money that we do not – this is fact.  We are not quitters who just give up and withdraw our children; our children are being forced out - silently cleansed from our public schools. Mr. Miller, we certainly do understand how the system works, and it appears it is Advocacy Inc. who does not. Nevertheless, we wholeheartedly agree that the results of such a system are “unfavorable” for our children and families, to say the least.

            Your testimony also targets the parental safeguard of our right to a due process hearing as the culprit in breaking down communication, trust and relationships with schools, because “the one system that we have in the state doesn’t allow us to fix (problems.)”  Your solution to this is to “empower parents” through parent training, citing that in your experience “the more parents understand what their rights are, what the process is and what REASONABLE expectations they should have about the process and about their children’s education, the smoother the process goes.”

            This suggests that Advocacy Inc. believes it can “empower” us by training parents on the limitations of our rights, the avoidance of a dispute resolution process that overwhelmingly favors the school districts, and by reducing our expectations for our children and what the IDEA guarantees them. We agree that the less we expect from our special education system, the smoother the process goes.  But is enabling this paradigm through carefully-executed programs designed for the management of parental expectations advocating for us and our children or, rather, is it advocating for our public school districts by assisting them to maintain the status quo? Encouraging us to succumb to the limitations of our Texas schools and their strong-arm tactics leading to the effective imprisonment of our children in a floundering and often hostile special education system, is not our idea of advocacy.

            You also go on to say that in your experience, as soon as parents learn more about their rights and the way the process works, and the schools know they know what their rights are, things inevitably get a whole lot better. In our experience, the more we learn about our children’s true educational needs and their rights under the IDEA, and as soon as we begin actively advocating for them, things get a whole lot worse. We are then suddenly perceived as a threat, as opposed to smiling mutes who nod in agreement to any token our district is willing to offer our child. This is evidenced by Texas school districts’ $58 million payout in the last reported year of 2006-2007 to attorneys such as your fellow panel member, Mr. Borreca of Bracewell & Giuliani, who then begin to take over the ARD process to shut us out while stockpiling the tax dollars intended and desperately needed for our children’s education.

            Speaking of Mr. Borreca, we must take this opportunity to express how inappropriate we find your “teamwork” and the enthusiastic agreement you expressed by nodding your head throughout his testimony. You must know that Mr. Borreca is no friend or advocate of our children. His objective is to defeat families in due process on behalf of his school district clients. Despite this very active and profitable business for himself and his firm, he testified that the statistics of due process requests filed would indicate there is virtual perfection in the delivery of services to special needs students in our state, and that we enjoy easy access to legal representation, primarily through services provided by your agency. As an attorney with AI, you also must be familiar with the huge number of intakes your agency receives and the rate at which our families are denied help in remedying special education matters. Yet you did not speak up, Mr. Miller. As you well know, the statistics Mr. Borreca cited of cases that go on to due process and even the total number of complaints filed are in no way representative of the countless number of drained parents who have already been “trained” by AI, the districts, hearing officers and even fellow parents themselves that any efforts on their part to remedy a disagreement through this dispute resolution process will most likely be a waste of their precious little time and severely stretched resources. Our already well-managed “expectations” and keen understanding of “how the process works” is the very reason these numbers are so low, not evidence of a system that is working.

            You then go on to suggest alternatives to due process. We agree that due process is no remedy in Texas where, as AI knows and has informed so many of us, the vast majority of cases are ruled in favor of the schools while the parents’ chances of winning are slim to none. But this doesn’t mean that due process is not an essential right (and, in fact, all the more critical to parents in Texas who have no other avenues such as a scholarship option when a district refuses to adequately address their child’s needs;) it means it’s not being fairly executed in Texas. Litigation is widely acknowledged as an essential enforcement mechanism of the IDEA, and this process works well in other states that apply the law and enforce its spirit and intent.

            But instead of acknowledging the bias in this state, you testified that this safeguard itself is the problem, not the clear and well-established pattern of faulty enforcement of the IDEA via the TEA’s due process system and our federal courts in the Fifth Circuit. Parents wouldn’t need due process if this safeguard was fairly executed, because if our schools were held accountable to the IDEA through litigation, accountability would filter down to the earliest stages of the IEP process and favorable results would be achieved without the need for dispute resolution. The only objective that training parents to avoid due process will accomplish is more bulletproof behavior from our districts and the further polarization of public schools and parents. Without an effective IDEA enforcement mechanism (which is what due process should be instead of reinforcement for schools to skirt their obligations under the law as it is in Texas,) you must recognize that any measures to improve relationships between parents and districts may facilitate isolated positive outcomes but, at the end of the day, will still leave districts calling all the shots and parents at the mercy of the administrators’ willingness to do the right thing. Simply stated, the IDEA honor system under which the state is currently operating is not working, and it never will as long as districts remain in total control and the IDEA is not enforced through tough sanctions and litigation.

            In closing, we would like to add that many of us have children in our public schools and we, too, are public school supporters who believe systemic changes are critical to benefit all children who attend. We recognize that some districts do a better job than others, as do certain schools within districts, certain classrooms within schools, and certain teachers within classrooms. But there are many, many Texas schoolchildren with special needs who are either being left behind or purged through a silent cleansing with nothing but a benefit to those schools who keep the tax dollars their families contribute. For Advocacy Inc. to blame a parental safeguard for the problems we face, even going so far as to assign much of the blame to the parents themselves, while testifying on the promising practices of districts and their successful delivery of FAPE to special education students throughout Texas, is a hard pill to swallow. For Advocacy Inc. to suggest that the inadequacies of our special education system can be remedied by parent trainings designed to lower our expectations for our children and discourage us from pursuing their rights under IDEA through the safeguards available to us, is extremely troubling. Accepting the shortcomings of our special education system through surrender and marginalizing our children is not our idea of advocacy and will not help our children. We will not stand by quietly as our children’s needs are ignored and their rights are strategically circumvented. We would have expected our P&A agency to help us give our children a voice instead of masterminding ways to perpetuate their silence. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

            It is bad enough for Advocacy Inc. to refuse to help countless families who have been forced out of the public school system into private placements. Such a position is indefensible when the IDEA itself includes private placements on the required continuum of placement options and Texas is dead last in awarding them. But then to team up with teachers’ unions, school administrator councils like TCASE and powerhouse law firms such as Bracewell & Giuliani to take an active stand against a scholarship program in an attempt to force all of us to stay stuck in an all too often inflexible, unapologetic, deficient, and downright hostile public special education system of zero accountability and consequences, is not only unacceptable, it is unconscionable. If this is your agency’s idea of advocacy then, please, don’t do us any more favors.

Sincerely,

Texas Parents of Special Education Students

cc:        Honorable Members of the Texas Senate Education Committee

            Ms. Mary Faithfull, Executive Director, Advocacy Inc.

            Ms. Elaine Roberts, Legal Director, Advocacy Inc.

            Ms. Susan Murphree, Advocacy Inc.