I wanted to write a post sharing our story regarding our
fight with the school district to enroll Kai into the public auditory/oral
program. We requested twice that he be
enrolled into the public school and twice they denied him. Unfortunately, the post doesn’t express the
raw emotions that I went through this past year during that fight. Many times I felt hopeless and didn’t know
where to turn (besides to God). I had 8
meetings in 9 months with the school district, most of which were contentious
meetings. Anybody aware of IEP meetings
know there are 20 individuals from the school district that attend and only 1
you. I went in to the program not
knowing my rights and didn’t know what my role was in directing Kai’s
education. Eventually I learned my rights and found my
voice. I will never let go of being the
ultimate decision maker of Kai’s education ever again. Here
is our story;
Kai started receiving early intervention services through
the school district once he had been home for a year, which was May 2011. His
services consisted of an hour long weekly speech therapy, and monthly physical
and occupational therapy which was all conducted in my home. We
also take Kai to private therapy for speech and PT. I went
into the early intervention program, uneducated about the process and naïve about
how to navigate the system. Kai had
been receiving services for two months when we discovered through the ABR (sedated
brain stem response) that his hearing loss was much more significant than we
initially thought. He was diagnosed
with a bilateral moderate to severe hearing loss. The impact of his hearing loss hit me
immediately! This hearing loss is going
to affect every aspect of his life, from his education to his safety to his
social life. I realized immediately
that the services that he was being provided at home were not going to meet his
language and communication needs. He
needed something more than what I or the school district was providing him at
that point. I asked the school district to enroll him into
the Auditory/Oral program where hearing impaired children learn to listen and
talk. I went into my first IEP meeting unprepared
and naïve because I thought a hearing impaired child would automatically be
enrolled into a school that would meet his language needs. The A/O program is a public school, so he
can’t be denied access… right?
Wrong! It was apparent from the
start that the people from the A/O program upon seeing Kai did not want him
enrolled in their program. They began
stating all the reasons why it would not be an ‘appropriate placement’. Believe me they don’t come out and deny your
child flat out. There is legal
terminology that they can and can’t use, the word “deny” is never used, “inappropriate
placement” is the new terminology to deny access. My school district concurred with the
Auditory/Oral staff and stated that they had a language enriched environment
right there at the Early Education center that would meet all of Kai’s
needs. I was foolish or naïve enough to
believe them and agreed that Kai should attend it. At this
point, I believed that everybody else on Kai’s IEP team were the experts and
more importantly I believed that they all had Kai’s best interest in mind. Unfortunately, I had abdicated my role to
them. I observed the local program that they
described as language and verbally enriched and immediately declined to enroll
Kai. All of the children were lying on
mats with the only way to communicate was to cry or grunt. This was for severe special needs children
who were NEVER going to communicate. I was stunned and didn’t really understand
what had happened in the IEP meeting and how anybody would think that this is
the right environment for Kai. Kai went back to receiving services at home
again. In November, we reviewed the
goals that were set in May and Kai was making progress with both his gross and
fine motor skills, but his language had not progressed at all. I was really starting to get nervous about
Kai’s future, his language, how were we going to get this child a method of
communication? I asked again if he
could be enrolled in the public auditory/oral program. We
had our second IEP meeting in December.
I was told “off the record” that Kai was going to be accepted at the
auditory/oral program this time. I
asked to observe the program prior to the IEP meeting and I brought Kai with
me. A
day later at the IEP meeting the teacher from the auditory/oral program started
the meeting by saying “That their program was an ‘inappropriate placement’ for
Kai.” Shocked! Dismayed!
What??? A denial again!!! I sat through the rest of the meeting sick to
my stomach. I felt like someone had just
told me my child had cancer and only had 6 months to live. What was I going to do with this child that
was not learning to communicate??? Panic was starting to set in!!!! Once
again our school district offered a special education program that was not
suited for a child that is hearing impaired and again I refused the
placement. I couldn’t believe that in
the year 2011, a child could be denied access to a public school. I
found out later that when the A/O teacher met Kai she thought he was a
“handful”. She was overwhelmed already with too many
kids, in too small of space and the thought of Kai being added to her classroom
put her over the edge. At night after
the kids were asleep I started to research and educate myself about our legal
rights. In January, with no other
auditory/oral public options, we enrolled Kai into a private auditory/oral
school called Northern Voices. Let just
say God has a way of working things out for you, it was the perfect place for
Kai. We
could only afford for Kai to attend 3 days a week, so we continued with his
home based services through the school district on Thursdays and Fridays. The week that Kai started Northern Voices I
asked to meet with the school district again because I was going to ask them to
pay for Northern Voices since they are the ones that deemed the public school
“inappropriate”. I never got very far in the meeting because
once I said the magic words “denied access” the whole tone of the meeting
changed. All of a sudden the public auditory/oral
program was an “appropriate placement” and if we wanted him to go there then
yes, he could go there. WAIT! Here was a problem…I LOVED Northern
Voices. They were hopeful for Kai, they
wanted him and they saw him as full functioning person rather than a disabled
child unlike the school district. More
importantly, the public auditory/oral staff had now convinced me that the A/O
public school was not an “appropriate placement”. When I
went to observe it, what they said about why it would not be appropriate for
Kai was accurate, it was overcrowded, there were safety concerns due to Kai’s
Ataxia and the school was geared toward older kids. Here
is the deal though the school district can’t deny your child access because of
over-crowding and safety concerns. By
law they have to meet a child’s educational needs if they can’t meet it in the
public school they need to pay for the private school. Another problem for the school district was
the fact that Kai was turning 3 in February and switching from an IFSP (home
based services) to an IEP. By law they have
to have an IEP in place by age three.
The IEP is based on all new assessments of Kai that need to be
conducted. None of the assessments were
even started by the beginning of February and there was no way that they could
put an IEP in place by his birthday.
Kai continued at Northern Voices and received services at home while the
IEP team conducted assessments and put together an IEP. Unfortunately, the school district put
together an IEP before the assessments were conducted. We had our 4th IEP meeting in
February to discuss placement for Kai once he turns 3 years old. I wanted the school district to pay for
Northern Voices. I began working with an
advocate from the Pacer organization (they work to ensure that disabled people
receive equal rights, they truly are my hero!). In brevity my advocate concluded that the
school district had not followed the law for any of the meetings or evaluations
of Kai and there was no documentation that the school district could provide to
prove otherwise. My advocate is a
seasoned professional and she said to me multiple times that she has never seen
such egregious errors. After reviewing
all the documentation or lack thereof from Kai’s school file she called me and
apologized and said that Kai was not being served well by the school district. She told me that there were so many missteps
that from a legal standpoint I could and should file a complaint with the MN
Department of Education. They would
investigate how Kai was served and if any laws were broken then they would follow
up with the school district and possibly they would make the school district
pay for Northern Voices. I put the idea of the complaint in my back
pocket and continued to work with the school district. We had a 5th IEP meeting in March
where we finally discussed Kai’s assessments these are usually done prior to
the IEP placement meeting. Regardless
of when I received it, the evaluation was alarming! Kai was
-3 STD from the mean in all language aspects!!! I
knew that Kai was not speaking but seeing it on paper in a quantifiable way
really gave me that punch in the stomach.
I felt the assessments bolstered
my case for the school district to pay for Northern Voices. The IEP was finally completed a month after
his birthday and I refused to sign it since they wanted to send Kai to the
public auditory/oral school rather than pay for Northern Voices. The
discrepancy between how much individual speech the public and private school
were willing to give Kai was significant.
Next we had a Conciliation
meeting with the school district to determine if we could come to terms with an
IEP that would be acceptable to both of us.
Unfortunately, we could not come
to terms and once again we refused to sign their proposed IEP. This led us to our 7th meeting
which was Mediation and is facilitated by a lawyer who is employed by the State
of MN. Our advocate attended this
meeting along with Dan and me. My goal was to get the school district to pay
for at least a year of Northern Voices to make up for the fact that they denied
him access twice and he wasn’t getting the appropriate education he
needed. To me this was the only
satisfactory outcome of the meeting. I
was ready to file a complaint with the MN Department of Education if the school
district didn’t concur and to take it to a court of law. However, the school offered us a deal to
serve Kai and after much discussion we agreed to it. Mediations are confidential so I won’t share
the specifics in this post.
Personally, I didn’t want to take the offer because I didn’t want to
relinquish this opportunity because I really believed that we had the school
district on the ropes and once we let them off the hook, we lost our
opportunity and won’t be able to get it back.
I didn’t think the meeting would take long but it lasted an entire 6
hours! It was emotionally draining to
say the least.
The first couple days after I signed the agreement I
really felt that I had failed Kai. I
felt that Northern Voices was the only program that could teach him to speak. However, since then my feelings have changed
and I am very excited and hopeful for
Kai that the public auditory/oral school will serve him well and that he will
continue to progress. The entire
public A/O school is changing from how it looked last December. They are moving from a 1 room classroom
where they were serving age 2 through 5, to a newly constructed building which
will house the A/O school which will have 3 separate classrooms and 3 separate
speech therapy rooms, the Early Childhood Intervention Program and the
Pediatric Rehabilitation Center (where Kai receives his private speech and PT
therapies). The best part of all of it
is that the newly constructed building has moved from a town approximately 20
miles away to our hometown. We will
give it a try and we always know that Northern Voices which is an exceptional
program is always there for us. We can
choose for Kai to go there at any time.
There are so many lessons that I have learned this past
year regarding working with the school district and I will share those with you
in Part 2.
