Special Ed Basics - Parentally Placed Private Placements

You might be getting the sense that special education law and policy is more complicated than you originally thought.  Boy has it been a learning curve for me, and I am still on that curve.  One of the interesting little wrinkles that we need to cover (so that I can post about some recent developments) is the situation where a parent is unhappy with the public school services that her kid is receiving.  Maybe she disagrees with the amount of services, or doesn't think the service providers are effective.  She finds a local private school, enrolls her kid in the school, and then notifies the public school of her decision.

Assuming the simplest case (the school had provided FAPE, and there's no due process hearing, no litigation about that issue), the public school system is basically done with this kid.  The LEA has no obligation to provide special ed services to the child, and no obligation to pay the tuition for the private school.  On the side of the private school, the private school has no obligation to provide any special ed services because they're not a public school, and not subject to the requirements of IDEA.  (Charter schools are tricky.  They are usually public schools, and so are legally subject to IDEA, but the fact of the matter is is that they rarely offer adequate special ed services to students, even though they receive funds from the LEA to do so.)

So this situation can put parents in a difficult position.  On the one hand, they might feel their child's education is suffering in the public school - but at least the kid is getting some kind of special ed services, at no cost to the parent.  On the other hand, if they want a (presumably) better education at a private school, there are no included special ed services, and all this is coming out of the parents' pockets.

The IDEA does provide an outlet, but one that's a hard road to travel.  In order to get the public school system to reimburse for a parentally-placed private placement, the parent must prove that (a) the public school did not provide FAPE, and (b) the parents provided notice of their intent to remove their child.  To do this, the parent generally needs to file for due process (in order to prove the first prong).  This is hard - due process hearings can be long and drawn out, and meanwhile, the parent is paying for this private placement.  A lot of parents simply can't take on this financial and emotional burden.

So, some states have tried to offer alternatives.  In Florida, the McKay scholarships are offered to students on IEPs that want to attend private schools.  In Colorado, Douglas County is offering school vouchers on a pilot basis to kids that want to attend private schools.  In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee school district had a similar voucher program - that became the subject of a complaint filed with the DOJ.   Sadly, in all of these cases, there have been serious flaws in the implementation, and how the programs support (or, more accurately, don't support) kids with disabilities.  And that, my friends, will be covered in my next post on this topic.