This may be long but I have to get it off my chest. I need to vent somewhere so I'm doing it here anonymously. I assume I'm not alone in fighting the school so maybe someone out there has advice.
Background (5 paragraphs long)
We live on Long Island New York in a good (rated 9) school district. Our son is 9 years old. He had delayed speech and we agreed to let the school district provide speech therapy to him in K-2 (2017-2020 school years). Prior to agreeing with the school we took our son to Mary Camarata (
https://latetalkersconsulting.com/about/) who is one of the country's leading experts on late talking children. She did a number of tests with our son and the end result is that she told us our son has an IQ in the normal range, has normal learning speed, but processes information in a different manner. This processing difference is why he has language delay. She also performed and autism test (she is qualified to perform those tests) and she confirmed he is not autistic. She also told us to NOT allow the school to perform an IQ test because they are done verbally and our son was guaranteed to fail a verbal IQ test due to his speech delay. She also told us the school would push autism because that is the "en vogue" thing nowadays and that districts across the country are mislabeling boys (it's almost always boys) as special needs. However the school told us that in order to get speech therapy we had to consent to an IQ test and we also had to agree to other services which we didn't want (they told us it was "all or nothing" and at the time we believed he needed speech therapy). Stupidly we agreed to the extra services if they would label him as "speech delayed" and not "autistic" which is what they wanted to label him as (just like Mary predicted).
After the testing was done the school psychologist called us in and told us about our son. She informed us that our son has a 66 IQ. IQ ranges from 70-130 with "normal" falling between 85-115. Scores outside of 70-130 are rare. (
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-average-iq-2795284) My uncle has Down's syndrome so I've spent 40 years visiting him and being around people at his group home who have low IQs. Based on my experience with these people and experience with my son I know my son does not have a 66 IQ. I also work with math and statistics at my job every day (I work for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) so I'm well aware of how to analyze statistics. I just told the psychologist that it's essentially impossible for my son to have a 66 IQ because that is more than 2 standard deviations from the mean and essentially there is a 2% probability of his IQ being that low. I told her that our expert (Mary Camarata) said our son would score very low due to the test being verbal in nature and our son having language delay. In the end we agreed to let the school provide Occupational and Speech therapy and an in-class aid for our son because we really wanted him to get speech therapy.
Fast forward to April 2020. Throughout the past 3 years the school had been trying to talk us into removing our son from a general education class and put him in a special education class. Once again at our annual special education meeting (we had to have these meetings for our son to continue speech therapy) they pushed for a change of placement. I recorded the call because of our poor experience with this group of people. It was 3 hours long and we said "no" to changing his placement 9 separate times during the call. Nine times. After the call we filed a Freedom of Information Act request to have all communication from district employees about our son (again we didn't trust these people). In June 2020 we got a giant document dump of hundreds of pages. One thing my wife found was a draft letter from the district to the parents informing us that they were changing our son's placement to a special education class for the 2020-2021 School year based on the fact that "all parties, including the parents, are in agreement". I immediately emailed the head of the special education department and informed her that we did not agree, that I had the call recorded as proof, and that we will NEVER agree to change his placement. I requested she change the letter so it would say the parents were not in agreement with the school's recommendation. She emailed back saying, essentially, "you did agree to it and I'm moving forward with this change of placement".
So we sued the school district. It's called a "due process complaint" when you file suit against a school district. In our complaint we included the email from me to her and her response dated June 10/11 and the letter dated June 12. Our argument was simple: on June 12 the district issued a change of placement letter stating that the parents were in agreement when they had full knowledge the parents were not in agreement. The proof of that was the emails on June 10/11. Now, according to the law, the school district is allowed to move a child without parental consent however they have to go through many hurdles and provide pages of explanation in their placement change letter. Our district didn't do that so this was a slam dunk case from a legal perspective. We had our hearing before the Administrative Law Judge in early July. We began, as petitioner, and our argument was simple: We had a recording where we said "no" to a change of placement 9 times. We received this letter on June 10 as part of our FOIA request and immediately emailed the head of special education to inform her of the error in her letter and requesting her to change it. At the time the letter was issued the district was aware we did not agree therefore this change of placement letter was invalid and we requested the court to direct the school to put our son back in a general education placement. We said that if the school wants to move him without parental consent they are required by law to provide rationale for their decision including recent cognitive and behavioral testing and submit those tests and their rationale for their decision in the placement change letter.
The school district's lawyer then had her turn. Her argument was also simple: who cares? Who cares what the parents think. The district believes removing our son from a general education program is in The Best Interests of The Child. She conceded the fact that they did not fill out the letter correctly but what's the big deal? They were moving forward with the placement change because we consented to the district providing services (speech therapy) and we can not consent to one thing and then deny the school from providing anything else they saw fit. And the judge sided with the school (the entire special education system is corrupt). The judge agreed that if we consented to ANY service provided by the district we were consenting to ANY decision the district wanted to make in regards to our son. So our only recourse was to revoke our consent to any services. We had the school district issue a new letter stating that our consent was revoked and our son was considered a general education student. Our son was to receive no IEP and no special education services. This was July 2020. We also requested and were granted a change in elementary school for our son (they are a mile apart so no big deal) because our relationship with the prior school was negative.
Current Problem
Yesterday was 60 degrees here in New York. Our son wanted to ride his bike after school. So of course we let him. At 4:15 I got a call from the principal saying he had my son at his school and my son was "injured". So we went to pick him up. My son had a scratch on his chest from a tree branch he got from climbing a tree. The principal told me he called the police who turned the case over to CPS. He said we were negligent parents because we allowed our 9 year old "special needs" child to ride his bike and climb trees while we weren't watching him. He said this "injury" was a direct result of our negligence. I kept my cool and just packed up my son's bike and went home. Last night we got a visit from the night-time CPS person on staff who took a picture of our son's chest. Monday they will send out the full-time CPS person to do the investigation.
Edit to add one other piece of information: In July when we revoked our consent we got a letter from the district stating that our son is considered a general education student. So we're going to submit that letter to CPS to counter the principal's argument that our son is special needs.
According to New York state law 9 year old children can ride their bike without parental supervision. Each day there are dozens of kids at the school riding their bike, playing on the playground equipment, playing basketball, etc. There are few, if any, parents around.
We've been fighting the school for 4 years. Even though we removed him from their special education program we are still getting harassed.