Just in time for new school year: Dept of Education issues new guidance on disciplining students with disabilities
This is a constant area of difficulty and dispute. Many school administrators just cannot get it through their heads that punitive punishment is not the appropriate response to behavior caused by a student’s disability! Hopefully this new guidance will serve as a reminder that it is illegal for schools to punish kids for manifestations of their disability. Instead, they have to come…
Districts are breaking the law when they give parents a false choice to force disabled kids to wear masks or forfeit their right to special ed
Yes, parents of students w/ developmental disabilities are facing a huge problem choosing between the risk of attending school unmasked or staying home with insufficient services. But this Riverside administrator and others like him that present parents with this false choice are exacerbating the problem: “students with disabilities across California are either waiting to get their special education services or forfeiting them for independent…
Ninth Circuit: Newsom ban on school during COVID violated the rights of rich people but not poor people
DISCLAIMER: that title is mostly tongue-in-cheek trolling. What the Ninth Circuit held on July 23, in Branch et. al v Newsom et. al, was that Newsom’s order closing schools because of COVID burdened private school parents’ fundamental rights to decide how they educate their children. It did not, however, burden the rights of any public school children, because the government does not…
Federal Court in California: Office of Administrative Hearings should not apply California evidence rules in special ed cases
Magistrate Judge De Marchi of the Northern District of California issued an order yesterday in NN v. MOUNTAIN VIEW-LOS ALTOS UNIONHIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT. In this order, the court considered whether to allow an expert who testified at an administrative special education hearing to provide additional testimony during the federal court appeal of the administrative decision. During the administrative hearing, the administrative law judge prohibited the…
Great News for Families seeking Regional Center services!
This week, the Court of Appeal reversed the Ventura Superior Court’s decision in Tri-Counties Ass’n v. Ventura County Public Guardian which reversed the ALJ’s finding that A.V. met the statutory criteria for developmental disability: he had a qualifying condition of autism, i.e., ASD; his ASD was substantially disabling; and the condition originated before age 18 and is therefore met the qualifying conditions…
Good news for special ed families impacted by COVID
As we all know, kids in special education were the victims of blatant denials of services and education throughout the pandemic. In California, a state law required school districts to set up a distance learning plan for each student in special ed, but from what I’ve seen, most school districts just sent out a one-size-fits-all form letter to every family saying, in…
A Hard-Fought Win in Ventura Superior Court
Today we prevailed in a demurrer filed by Ventura Unified School District seeking to dismiss our claims against them on behalf of a girl who is now in middle school at VUSD. There were two tough things about this motion: First, the district sought to dismiss our claim against them under the California Unruh Act, which prohibits discrimination in California businesses. A…