Month: August 2019

DO NOT TAKE THIS POST AS LEGAL ADVICE.  I am a lawyer, but I’m not your lawyer.  The information I give here is for purposes of arguing my position, not giving advice.  If you want legal advice, go see your own lawyer.

I keep hearing that the current negotiations between the district and its teachers’ union are top-secret and that nobody involved in them is permitted to disclose what happens in them to anyone who was not involved in them.  The negotiators seem to think that they are each other’s therapists rather than on opposite sides of a negotiation.

And, as far as I can tell, they’re wrong.  Let’s look at what the contract and the laws actually say.

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We are the parents of a disabled, non-verbal child who just finished his time in SAD 75. At first, we thought that the district was giving our son a great education. Then we started to have problems. When we saw an attorney, he pointed out to us all of the ways in which the district was not meeting its obligations to our son.

Our biggest concern during our son’s time in the district was his safety. Because he is non-verbal, he couldn’t tell us what happened to him in school. We tried, unsuccessfully, to win the right to put a recording device on him so that he could “tell” us about his school day.

Because we could not put a recording device on our son (legally), we had to rely upon the district’s people to tell us anything that was important. There were some spectacular failures in that regard. And, for the most part, the people who worked with our son not only didn’t care but actively fought against our desires to find out what happened to and around him while he was at school.

You will read about all of the problems that we had, and about the successes. Along the way, among many other things, you’ll learn about

• the time our son’s teachers (including ed techs) lost him for several minutes and never told us;
• the time our son came home from school with bruises that were inflicted on him by someone else, and the district’s inability or unwillingness to tell us, and an investigator, what happened;
• the efforts his teacher made to prevent us from seeing her classroom in the morning when we dropped our son off at school;
• the time that a high-ranking district official asked us to choose between having the district give our son a good education and having them follow the law–apparently them doing both was not an option;
• the time that the district’s lawyers thought that we had to comply with a contract between the district and the teachers’ union;
• the time that the district’s lawyers threatened us with criminal prosecution if we put a recording device on our son–which is not illegal;
• the district’s official statements that it would “respect” the wishes of a bully’s parents not to inform the victim’s parents about the bullying;
• our son’s teacher’s threat to sue us for $500,000 because we filed a request to have our son assigned to a different teacher; and
• the formal grievances filed by the unions for the staff that worked with our son demanding that they not have to “report” or “tattle” on each other if they saw something concerning with another staff member.

We hope that this blog will lead to some better training and oversight of special-education staff, and to other improvements in the District.

We plan to post weekly, hopefully every Wednesday night.

Thanks for joining us!