The propaganda that school district’s effectively convey in the media, in legislatures, and at hearings is that parents are somehow victimizing poor hapless school districts. To me it is like Goliath complaining about his back hurting because he has to bend over so far to smote his opponents. The advantage is on one side; it is real chutzpah to assert that parents are the ones doing the victimizing.
It is an amazing assertion that deserves to be called propaganda since it is a Big Lie ! Schools viciously fight parents sometimes over very small and obvious issues to "make a point" and to "set an example." The Deal case in Tennessee is a perfect illustration. [Download deal_case.pdf
]. The school district’s attorney spent well over a million dollars in attorney’s fees to oppose the parents’ request for an aide for their child with autism, when the need for this service was obvious. The parents prevailed in that case after years of litigation. While such hard ball tactics may have a place in the private legal arena they are not appropriate in the "warm and fuzzy" settings of school that are supposed to be about the student’s educational needs.
In a recent case reported in the Washington Post, a high school student with Asperger’s syndrome was mercilessly
harassed, bullied and threatened. The parents described their son as a
"bully magnet." Staff was repeatedly made aware of
the situation but did not intervene.The parents eventually moved their
son to private school to preserve his emotional and educational well
being and sued the school for the tuition of $9950.
Instead of settling the case the school district’s attorney
humiliated the parents in prehearing proceedings and attacked the
parents during the hearing. As an outgrowth of the due process hearing
a school official was
actually indicted for perjury. Nevertheless, the parents lost this
case and are footing the bill for his education.
In the wake of this decision, the reporter correctly observed:
"Often the parents are more or less defenseless against a competent
lawyer, since they often cannot afford to hire their own attorney. A
whole sector of the bar, lucrative to many of the private specialists,
is devoted to what seems to me, at least in part, the science of
intimidating, humiliating and defeating parents in these cases. Some of
the lawyers attend conferences designed to teach them the latest
tricks, all of which is completely legal in our adversarial system."
The conferences that the reporter is referring to are fact. They are sponsored by many school lobby groups. One organization that I am familiar with from their publications is LRP, a publisher of legal texts and online databases in the area of special education and other legal topics. Its annual conference sponsors seminars that are very one sided in favor of the school, and are devoted to topics that educate school staff and their attorney on how to maximize the minimum level of service and still claim to be on the right side of the FAPE line.
I recently came across a remarkable website that graphically illustrates the propaganda that schools disseminate. It show big law books piled up that are supposedly creating unreasonable burdens on schools. First, many of these large "books" portray laws that are only a few page long like FERPA and are rarely litigated. Other books pertain to workplace safety that all employers are subject to; schools are hardly being singled out for special burdens.
Our only answer is to fight back on the political front. We need to support disability rights organizations, we need to write letters to the editor, we need to organize on a grass roots level and write to our Federal and State lawmakers so that it is understood what is truth and what is propaganda on stilts.