Class action suit - Short School days for disabled students

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Oregon is denying hundreds of students with disabilities the right to a full school day in violation of federal laws, and state education officials need to ensure that schools can and do provide them the complete and meaningful education to which they are entitled, say the advocates and parents behind a federal class action lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The lawsuit, brought on behalf of four Oregon children whose parents say they have been denied the right to go to school for some or all of the day and all others like them, names Gov. Kate Brown, who is also the state’s superintendent of education, state schools chief Colt Gill and the Oregon Department of Education as defendants.

And they are far from alone, advocates for children with disabilities say. FACT Oregon, an advocacy organization that operates a helpline for Oregon parents, received 260 unduplicated reports of children with disabilities subjected to shortened school days due to their behaviors from September 2016 to November 2018, the lawsuit says.

The Oregonian/OregonLive first called attention to the issue of special education students being denied full school days nearly three years ago. The news outlet highlighted the case of a Portland high school student with autism whom district officials ordered sent home at 11:15 a.m. each day.

At the time, the state education department issued a strongly worded memo telling schools that practice was not appropriate and must stop.

But since then, despite being notified that many special education students in Oregon, particularly in small and rural districts, were denied a full academic schedule, the department hasn’t taken actions to stop it, said Joel Greenberg, a senior attorney for Disability Rights Oregon, who works on many such cases and is a party to the class action suit.

Most of the students who are allowed to go to school or to receive tutoring at home for as little as a few hours a week have behaved in ways that scared people, damaged property or even hurt others at their schools, the suit acknowledges. But advocates say the onus is on schools to figure out what triggers the challenging behavior, what frustrates the student, what the student is trying to accomplish -- and create a learning environment in which disruptive behavior is prevented or at least effectively addressed before it escalates.

Oregon isn’t alone in cutting special education students’ class hours based on behaviors caused by their disabilities, said Lewis Bossing, a senior staff attorney for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, who has been involved with several landmark special education cases. But, partly due to Greenberg’s work, the Oregon Department of Education has been made aware the problem is serious and widespread -- but hasn’t taken steps to correct that, Bossing said.

But Bossing said he and others recently helped reach a settlement with the Ohio’s education agency to have the state provide systemic supports to 14 large urban districts that have sent too many of their special education students to separate classrooms or segregated schools where they got poor-quality education. A judge could order Oregon to provide similar expertise, training, technical assistance and oversight to Oregon districts.

A unanimous 2017 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Endrew raised the bar for what public school benefits special education students are entitled to. The justices overruled an 80s-era Supreme Court decision that students were only entitled to “some” educational benefit and instead ruled students deserve “meaningful” education. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court that a child’s “educational program must be appropriately ambitious in light of his circumstances” and that “every child should have the chance to meet challenging objectives.”