I was parusing through the local paper this morning online and came across an article about how the supreme court ruled in favor of a set of parents who wanted reimbursement for a private education for their special education son.
I’m elated.
First off, the supreme court got it right-this is not for parents who deem the program that their child is pegged for to be inapropriate. For that, you still need to take the course of action described in the parent rights literature. This is for parents who are completely ignored by the school district, have not received a free, appropriate education for their child and have had to take their child elsewhere.
This is for the parents who have had the crap school psychs, teachers who ignore them and a system that is so broken that they had to pull their child to fix it.
In this specific case, the student was tested and the conclusion was that the child did not have a disability. Upon using their second opinion clause from the parent rights, the testing that the school had done was proven wrong, and the student was pulled to a private school for their education.
So, the parents sued for the cost of their child’s education, and who can blame them?
When a school district fails so miserably, they should reimburse the parents for the cost of educating their child. Private schools and therapies are NOT cheap, and can drain a parent’s income faster than anything out there.
Will the majority of parents need to use this recourse? I highly doubt it. This is an extreme step, albeit a needed one to keep the school districts in check and doing their job. I will say it’s nice to see that for once, the courts are considering the student and not the bottom line.
