Depleting Special Education Staff At The US Board of Education Will Worsen Abuses, similar to Assisted Suicide Abuses.

Meghan Schrader

By Meghan Schrader
Meghan is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and an EPC-USA board member.

As I’ve written, one of the reasons that I am a vehement assisted suicide opponent is observing the parallels between abuses of power in the Special Education system and abuses of power in the medical system.

Therefore, it is imprudent that in addition to the bevy of recent policy downgrades that seek to make what some people perceive as inordinately stringent disability rights laws less “unduly burdensome” and radically reducing staff at the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, the government has attempted to fire most of the staff who oversee the implementation of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. These changes have led to disabled students’ OCR complaints being stalled and have shifted important oversight of IDEA to whatever authorities the government thinks should be entrusted with that task. Although I’ll be the first to say that IDEA oversight was already corrupt, I seriously doubt that these rapidly dismantled systems are going to be replaced with better ones. I think hurriedly diluting and/or re-modeling oversight of IDEA will exacerbate the problem of Special Education students receiving a substandard education.

When I was a Special Education high school student between 1998 and 2002, people called Special Education students “SPEDS,” and I often heard teachers and students say things like:

Another teenager to me: “You’re a SPED? And you’re reading a book? That’s crazy. SPEDS are stupid and aren’t smart enough to read books!”

Social Studies teacher: “I used to work with retards. Oh, I’m sorry we can’t say that anymore, “Special Needs.” All I did there was rip people apart and keep them from killing each other.”

Teachers having a conversation in the hallway:

Teacher A: He said I was going to ruin his chances for college.”

Teacher B: “What does he mean? He’s a SPED, he’s stupid; he’s not going to college.”

But the comments weren’t Special Education students’ main problem; ambiguous laws gave authority figures the power to try to make Special Education students fulfill those stereotypes.

Between my sophomore and senior years of high school, Special Education and Guidance staff did the following things:

• Didn’t implement my sophomore IEP in a math class and told me to drop the class.
• As a junior I learned that I needed the class for college and fought to enroll in the class as a senior. I pointed out that I hadn’t completed the class because they had illegally violated my IEP. Staff tried to lean on the fact that the deadline for filing an IDEA complaint had already elapsed.
• The year that my IEP was violated, a bipartisan Massachusetts legislature lowered the state’s “Maximum Feasible Benefit” standard for Special Education to the federal Free and Appropriate Public Education “slightly more than the minimum” standard. Guidance and Special Education personnel claimed that because of that standard, the school only had to provide accommodations in classes that were “appropriate” for me to take, and that my dyscalculia was so severe that enrolling me in the class would be “inappropriate.”
• My access to the class with accommodations was still required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, but they tried to claim that under the Americans With Disabilities Act, I was not “otherwise qualified” to take the math class. I did get enrolled in the class a few days before senior year started, but only after my Mom’s panicked appeal to the assistant principal.
• At the time, the law didn’t require Special Education teachers to be highly qualified in the subjects they provided intervention in, so the Special Education teacher didn’t understand the math curriculum; my family had to hire a tutor to do the Special Education teacher’s job.
• I later learned that the math class was a state graduation requirement, but no one told me that.
• Staff told me that the only schools I could attend with a learning disability were a community college or state school. There’s NOTHING wrong with going to a community college or state school, but that advice was false and seemed designed to “keep me in my place.”
• Staff said that hiring a proctor for me to take the SAT II, which at the time was a version of the SAT that could help students show off their writing ability, was a waste of their money and wasn’t legally required because Special Education students didn’t take the SATII. They said that the Americans With Disabilities Act didn’t require schools to provide services that were “unduly burdensome” for them.
• They told me that actually, Special Education students didn’t go to college, so I shouldn’t bother taking any standardized tests.

Bigoted comments are upsetting, but they can, on some level, be “brushed off.” The worst thing about this situation were the loopholes in the law that enabled staff to try to manipulate my choices.

For instance, one of the staff members most insistent on me not taking college entrance exams was my guidance counselor “Dr. D.” I was able to arrange to take the regular SAT off campus with a proctor who didn’t know me, but for whatever reason that wasn’t an option for the SATII, and when I insisted on taking the SAT II, Dr. D. was able to exploit loopholes in the Educational Testing Services’s testing procedures for disabled students to make the process as miserable as possible. The regulations allowed schools to choose the proctor and give students standardized tests at whatever place or time was convenient for the proctor. This flexibility seems reasonable enough on paper and could have turned out fine. But, Dr. D. appointed himself as the proctor. Because I was getting double time on the exam, I wasn’t allowed to take the test on a Saturday morning like other students. He demanded that I take the test from 2 PM in the afternoon to 8 PM alone with him in his office, where he gleefully taunted me and violated my accommodations throughout the exam.

Unfortunately, this guidance counselor had control over several aspects of the college admissions process, so I had to be alone with him in his office several times.

For example, one day I dropped off paperwork at his office and he asked, “Meghan, did I upset you with what I said yesterday?” “Well, what you said about ‘treating me differently’ hurt my feelings,” I said. He said, “Well, you have to understand, you hurt me too, not to get into anything or anything.” “How have I hurt you?” I asked. “You keep interrupting me during the SAT, saying, “Why are we doing this now, why are we doing this now?” (I asked this because he was conducting testing procedures in strange ways that violated my accommodations).

We went back and forth about a couple of other things, and I said, “This is forbidden by my 504 plan.” “Is it?” he sneered. “Yes, and you were making noise,” I said. “Oh,” he said. (My accommodations for ADHD included a quiet environment, but he loudly shuffled papers, tapped files on his desk, printed paperwork and opened and closed file drawers while he was sitting across the table from me.)

Also, as I noted, the guidance counselor had insisted on appointing himself as my test proctor, but when I showed up to take the SATII, I noticed that two other disabled students taking the regular SAT had been allowed to start their tests in the morning and were taking the SAT with hired proctors. So, I said, “And you told me that you were giving the test to two other students, and when I showed up to take the test proctors had been hired to give the test to two other students, and you said you weren’t hiring proctors to give anyone’s test.” “I said that I wasn’t going to hire anyone to give your test,” he taunted. “That’s not what you said at the meeting,” I answered. “Oh,” he quipped dismissively. “And, if you were just going to give us the test together anyway, why would you make it so inconvenient for us by making us take it from the middle of the day until 8 PM? I mean, wouldn’t it be more convenient for you to just come in on a Saturday morning and give it to us? Why would you want to spend your entire evening doing that?” “Meghan, what does your father do for a living?” he demanded. “That’s not relevant,” I said. “Yes it is. What does your father do for a living?” “He’s a dentist,” I said. “A dentist. And does anyone tell him when to do his job?” “That has no relevance,” I answered. “Yes it does. Why should I give up my Saturday just to give you a test?” “Well, then why can’t someone else give it?” I asked. “I do not have to go through the trouble of finding you a proctor,” he scoffed.

“Dr. D, I feel that I’m being discriminated against,” I said. “Oh really?” “Yes. You lied about the SAT. You lied about the math class,” I said. “Your’re a very disrespectful girl,” he snapped. “How am I being disrespectful?” I asked. “You talk back to me. You talk back to the Special Education Director.” I answered, “I do not talk back, I’m standing up for my rights. I don’t feel you take my disability seriously.” “No,” he said. “I know what a learning disability is. This is not about a learning disability. This is about failure to submit to authority. I’m the administrator and you’re the student, and you shouldn’t even be questioning the things you’re questioning. You have no respect for adults, and you do not deal well with them.”

Then he said, “Just wait until you get to college; you’re gonna learn that you can’t treat adults that way. I think it’ll be very different for you.”

When he said this, he smirked, as if he were enjoying imagining my future suffering.

I started to cry, and he kept nodding and saying “uh huh, uh huh.” “I’m leaving,” I said. “Fine,” he said, “just go.”

In the months proceeding that exchange, the guidance counselor “accidentally” forgot to tell my AP English Exam proctor that I was getting accommodations on the test, and “accidentally” sent my transcripts to colleges without the standard explanation of our school’s weighted GPA system, which led at least one college to think that my GPA was 5 points lower than it really was.

All of this was very clearly discrimination, so I approached various people and organizations for help. I went to the Anti Defamation League diversity coordinators at my school, but they said I was experiencing a “personality conflict.” I called the ACLU, but they did not have a disability rights division.

The only organization that would investigate my complaint was the US Board of Education Office For Civil Rights. The process took 2 years to resolve in my favor, long after I had graduated. However, at least I was able to achieve a small measure of accountability. Moreover, after I filed the complaint, the guidance counselor “retired,” so no other disabled students had to work with that horrible bigot.

When one assumes that this stampede of disability policy changes, such as making key disability rights statutes more ambiguous, dismissing most of the US Department of Education’s Special Education staff and hurriedly dismantling organizations like OCR will somehow turn out well for people with disabilities, one is making inordinately generous assumptions about the moral compasses and competency of authority figures and bureaucrats, and the power of good people to resist them. That’s not how the world works.