STATE OF DENIAL: People with Developmental Disabilities Were Promised Help. Instead, They Face Delays and Denials. — ProPublica

People with Developmental Disabilities Were Promised Help. Instead, They Face Delays and Denials. — ProPublica

STATE OF DENIAL

People with Developmental Disabilities Were Promised Help. Instead, They Face Delays and Denials.

Arizona is known as the best state in the nation for people with developmental challenges. But its Division of Developmental Disabilities has turned down thousands of people who seek assistance because of paperwork issues.

SERIES:STATE OF DENIAL

Inside Arizona’s Division of Developmental Disabilities

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This article was produced in partnership with the Arizona Daily Star, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

Illustrated section breaks by Margie Smeller/Make Studio for ProPublica.

Kyra Wade’s favorite color is pink. The 11-year-old likes road trips and the movie “Monsters, Inc.” She loves to watch people laugh. Her culinary preferences run to noodles and rice.

Beyond that, her parents don’t know much about her needs and wants.

Kyra is autistic and profoundly deaf. She was born premature at about 27 weeks, just a little over 2 pounds, which has impacted pretty much everything: eyesight, hearing, digestion, sleep patterns. A strong tremor in her hand makes it impossible for her to use American Sign Language. Her parents think she recognizes a couple dozen signs.

They know she’s frustrated. Kyra often smacks herself on the side of the head with her hand or bites her palm so hard she draws blood, said her mother, Ka Wade. The Wades assume she is doing it when she is in pain. Kyra is not potty trained, but she got her period recently. Ka couldn’t explain what was happening.

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The Wades moved to Arizona in the summer of 2017 with the expectation that services provided by the state would help them care for Kyra. Arizona had long enjoyed a reputation as one of the best places in the country for people with developmental disabilities and their families. Thanks to a special Medicaid program created in 1988, Arizona had an innovative and generously funded system in place.

Arizona’s Division of Developmental Disabilities, or DDD, aimed to keep people with developmental disabilities at home with family, or in small group settings, rather than place them into institutions.

For many years, it worked. The division sent nurses, speech therapists and respite workers to assist families with the responsibilities of caring 24/7 for relatives with CONTINUE READING: People with Developmental Disabilities Were Promised Help. Instead, They Face Delays and Denials. — ProPublica

Can Schools Deliver Services To Students With Disabilities This Fall? : NPR

Can Schools Deliver Services To Students With Disabilities This Fall? : NPR

Schools Say They Have To Do Better For Students With Disabilities This Fall

For Sarah McLaren, who lives in a suburb of Minneapolis, talking about the spring is painful. Her daughter, a rising fourth-grader, struggles with auditory processing and receives special education services. But McLaren says her daughter had trouble keeping up with teachers on an iPad because the instruction was almost all talk.

"They'd tell her, 'Look at this problem, look at that problem. No, show me your worksheet,' " McLaren remembers. "The teachers were doing the best they could, but all those rapid verbal directions just overwhelmed her."

McLaren says her daughter went from loving school to dreading it. "[She] would literally run away from the iPad and hide in the closet or under the bed."

More than 7 million schoolchildren receive special education services in the U.S. But this spring, when the nation's schools were forced to teach remotely, many of those children were left behind, and some vital services — including physical, occupational and speech therapies — simply stopped. With many districts planning to continue remote learning in the fall, parents and caregivers expect better this school year. And school leaders know: They've got to do better.

Special education teacher Nikki Allinson, in Washington, D.C., says one of the greatest challenges she faced trying to teach remotely was that many of her students learn with the help of tactile, classroom-based tools — like laminated cards or magnetic letters for word decoding. But, in the spring, kids weren't given those tools for use at home. Allinson says that also made it "nearly impossible" to teach abstract math concepts. "I recorded so many videos of me with Legos, you know, trying to find things that they CONTINUE READING: Can Schools Deliver Services To Students With Disabilities This Fall? : NPR

How America's Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice | Dissident Voice

How America's Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice | Dissident Voice

How America’s Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice

Any conditions that compel the teacher to take note of failures rather than of healthy growth give false standards and result in distortion and perversion.— John Dewey,¹

Academic Fredrik deBoer has written a book, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice (All Points Books, 2020), that questions the enormous value attached to people based on their academic talent. The author defines the Cult of Smart thus: “It is the notion that academic value is the only value, and intelligence is the only true measure of human worth. (p 5-6)

I am of the mind that if the average person puts in sufficient effort and the environment is not prohibitive, then such a person can attain her academic goals. I have never thought that the degree of difficulty or ease of learning would be the same for each person. I considered this to be the case in most fields of endeavor be it sports, art, writing, music, etc. However, the truly elite levels would favor those who had the predilection, natural gifts, and put in the effort to succeed in a chosen field.

DeBoer departs from the convention thought that holds academic success is tied to effort; he acknowledges that there is inequality on academic aptitude.

DeBoer does not refrain from emphasizing that there is a strong genetic component to intelligence, but he also acknowledges the role of the environment, even stating, “Profoundly unequal environments for children can drown out genetic effects. (p 23) He downplays group genetic differences and focuses on individual genetic differences. Intelligence is not attributed to CONTINUE READING: How America's Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice | Dissident Voice

Ed Department Accused Of Diverting Funds From Students With Disabilities - Disability Scoop

Ed Department Accused Of Diverting Funds From Students With Disabilities - Disability Scoop

Ed Department Accused Of Diverting Funds From Students With Disabilities

A lawsuit filed this week accuses the U.S. Department of Education of jeopardizing students with disabilities by misdirecting funds meant to help schools deal with fallout from the pandemic.

Earlier this year, Congress included billions of dollars in funding for schools in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES, Act. But rules issued by the Education Department this summer about how that money should be allocated allow a good chunk of the money to be shared with private schools.

Steering the much-needed funds away from public schools is especially problematic for students with disabilities, according to the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, or COPAA, the nonprofit that filed the suit and works to advocate for the rights of students with disabilities and their families. Unlike private schools, public schools are legally required to serve students with disabilities.

“It is reprehensible that this administration is pressuring schools to open quickly while simultaneously taking away the very resources that would allow them to do so safely and effectively,” said Selene Almazan, legal director for COPAA. “As America’s schools, communities and families are in the midst of an economic and health crisis, now is not the time to deprive millions of public school children the education services they need — including students with disabilities, a population that Congress specifically intended the CARES Act funds to benefit.”

According to COPAA, as much as $1.5 billion could be diverted away from public schools under the rule just as these schools are dealing with higher costs for distance learning, changes to how they serve students with disabilities and other needs. Meanwhile, the state tax revenues that fund public schools have declined.

“At a time when students with disabilities are likely to have an CONTINUE READING: Ed Department Accused Of Diverting Funds From Students With Disabilities - Disability Scoop

PROOF POINTS: Survey reveals stark rich-poor divide in how U.S. children were taught remotely during the spring school closures - The Hechinger Report

PROOF POINTS: Survey reveals stark rich-poor divide in how U.S. children were taught remotely during the spring school closures - The Hechinger Report

PROOF POINTS: Survey reveals stark rich-poor divide in how U.S. children were taught remotely during the spring school closures

Low-income children reviewed old material while high-income children learned new things

As the coronavirus pandemic spread through the country, a common (socially distanced) conversation among friends and families compared how many hours of remote learning kids were getting. Preliminary results from a new survey of school districts confirm what many parents learned through the Zoom grapevine. The number of hours your kids got varied wildly depending on where you happen to live. But the amount of time was not the only difference, according to a recent survey: the type of instruction students received also diverged dramatically.

Twenty-five percent of districts said children in kindergarten through second grade were supposed to receive more than three hours of remote instruction every day but another 25 percent of districts reported only one hour or less. The two-hour-a-day difference narrowed a bit in higher grades but even by high school, many students received 1.5 fewer instructional hours every day than others (3 hours vs. 4.5 hours). Over several months of school closures, the daily difference in hours added up to a lot of instructional time. My back-of-the-envelope calculation puts it at more than 100 hours. (My math: 2 hours a day x 5 days a week x 12 weeks of school closures = 120 hours.)

 “One key question is why these differences occur and what do these differences mean for students,” said Mike Garet, head of the survey team at the American Institutes of Research (AIR), a nonprofit research organization. AIR presented early results from its “National Survey of Public Education’s Response to COVID-19” at a virtual session of the Education Writers Association’s national seminar on July 22, 2020. AIR sent out surveys to more than 2,500 of the nation’s 13,500 school districts in May and plans to release results periodically to inform education policymakers during the pandemic. This early report represents a 19 percent response rate so far and includes data from nearly 500 districts across 49 states and covers a wide range of both urban and rural regions.

I was surprised to learn that the difference in instructional hours can’t be simply explained by poverty. When researchers diced the survey data up CONTINUE READING: PROOF POINTS: Survey reveals stark rich-poor divide in how U.S. children were taught remotely during the spring school closures - The Hechinger Report

Special Education Lawsuits Are Growing During The COVID-19 Pandemic : NPR

Special Education Lawsuits Are Growing During The COVID-19 Pandemic : NPR

Families Of Children With Special Needs Are Suing In Several States. Here's Why.

Vanessa Ince's daughter, Alexis, has a rare chromosomal abnormality and autism. Alexis has thrived at her public school in Wailuku, Hawaii, and loves spending time with her classmates.

Ince says when the COVID-19 pandemic closed her school in Wailuku, the effect on her daughter's well-being was "devastating."

"Alexis regressed so severely. She was previously, I would say, 95% potty trained and she started wetting herself." She also regressed in other areas, her mother says: She went back to crawling and stopped trying to use her communication device.

Ince says her daughter, who is 10, especially seemed to miss being around other children, as well as her regular routines, structure and stimulation. She went from a "happy, bubbly, loving-life child," to wandering the house aimlessly. "She just looked flat and empty and not really there."

Ince and her husband have filed a lawsuit seeking to get Hawaii's Department of Education to pay for the services Alexis needs in a facility where she can see other children.

Education Dept. Says Disability Laws Shouldn't Get In The Way Of Online Learning https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/03/23/820138079/education-dept-says-disability-laws-shouldnt-get-in-the-way-of-online-learning

They are part of a growing number of parents around the country who are suing schools and state education departments over this issue. The Ince's attorney, Keith Peck, has also filed a suit seeking class action status for all families in the state who argue their students' Individualized Education Plans have been breached during the pandemic. (Hawaii's Department of Education did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.)

There is also a suit seeking national class action status, filed in New York City, that claims would-be plaintiffs in 20 states and growing.

Peck says that because Hawaii is a single, statewide school district, it makes it easier to CONTINUE READING: Special Education Lawsuits Are Growing During The COVID-19 Pandemic : NPR