The Individual's with Disabilities Education
Act (IDEA) was enacted by congress to protect children with disabilities
by ensuring that schools have high expectations for children with
learning disabilities. Unfortunately
the Region 17 Board of Education has failed our son. After two
years of "specialized instruction" in Killingworth Elementary
School, our child is clinically below where he was two years ago academically. This
is disturbing news to us as parents. This has happened
because of a blatant disregard for doing what is right and lawful.
A number of outside consultants have concurred with our concerns and
have identified numerous problems. The Region 17 Board of Education
has had 12 major procedural violations involving our son's educational
needs in the past two years. Mindy Otis, the director of Pupil Services
has the job of making sure these laws are followed by the school district
with regard to IDEA. Where has she been for the past two years?
Additionally, in February our son came home to announce
to us that he would be working with the school custodian when he finished his
school work or when his teacher's said it was a "good time". We
were quite disturbed by this news and the fact that no parental permission was
obtained for this. We promptly had a meeting with Rita Peretto the school
principal. Rita Peretto's explanation was that the school has a custodial
mentoring program and that our son will have to learn life skills. No
other children we know of are in this program. This situation was completely
inappropriate. Reading, writing and math are life skills!
Our son needs academic support that commensurate with his academic needs, not
extra time to go work with the custodian. The RSD 17 Board of Education
should be shocked and concerned by the lack of professionalism and common sense
that seems to permeate some administration staff in our school system. The
RSD 17 Board of Education should know that children with learning disabilities
learn in a different way. With the proper training and teaching techniques
many children are able to and in fact do make great progress.
There is no excuse for this failure. The fact that our middle school is
on the NCLB list for failure of the special education students to achieve appropriate
progress in two years is another telling sign that Region 17 School Board fails
to take seriously the implications of children with disabilities not succeeding.
Kristina Torino-Abbasi