Near the end of Delilah McBride’s second month of kindergarten in Taylor, Michigan, her family received jarring news from her principal: Delilah would be allowed to come to school only in the morning. Someone would need to pick her up before noon every day, even as the rest of her peers continued learning and playing together.
Delilah’s first several weeks of school in the fall of 2018 had been marked by discipline incidents and suspensions, as she got in trouble for not listening to instructions and hitting staff members. Her parents wanted to get her a special education designation — and all the supports that came with it. But instead, they were told by school administrators that their daughter “couldn’t handle full days,” said Sarah McBride, Delilah’s mother.
“It was a nonnegotiable thing,” McBride recalled. That night, as she and her husband scrambled to figure out who could watch Delilah in the early afternoon, questions swirled in her head: “How long is this going to go on? Were [school officials] able to do it?”
The short answer, according to special education lawyers and advocates across the country, is no. But that doesn’t stop it from happening frequently.
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This year, millions of students have had their schooling curtailed, prompting serious discussions about the effects of lost learning time. But a subset of students in special education has been quietly plagued with this problem for decades, often with devastating consequences. Shortening the school day for students with disabilities as punishment for their behavior is illegal, experts say. Instead, schools must support and address these issues in the classroom.
For the most part, however, schools are not required to justify their decisions to send students home early, nor is any significant data collected on this practice, allowing the problem to remain largely hidden. For many students, a shortened school day can last for months or even years, which can have a disastrous impact as they miss out on crucial academic, social and emotional learning time.
In the months following the decision to shorten Delilah’s day, McBride met with teachers and administrators in the Taylor School District about her daughter’s struggles. She continued to push for Delilah to be identified for special education services, which would open up a wealth of federal protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
The district, at first, resisted, McBride said. It did, however, create a behavior intervention plan, which is meant to outline the behavior challenges a child is having, why they’re happening and the strategies school staff should use to address them. McBride described Delilah’s plan as “a joke.”
In March 2019, McBride finally succeeded in getting her daughter identified as having an emotional impairment and given an individualized education program, or IEP. This document spells out what services and accommodations students with disabilities must get from their school districts. Delilah’s, for instance, included that she spend part of her day in a separate room getting instruction from a special education teacher. But her behavior intervention plan was also revised to include a provision that Delilah be picked up even earlier if teachers couldn’t get her behavior under control. “I refused to sign that,” McBride said.
“They brought up safety of staff and other students, which as a parent, I understand,” she said. “But my kid matters, too. Her education, her everything, matters, too.”
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Taylor School District officials said they could not discuss student information without authorization. They did not respond to questions about their policies regarding shortened school days, but said they followed state guidance.
Michigan is one of several states that has released guidance about shortened school days. Like most, it stresses that the practice should be rare, noting that the only time it is appropriate to shorten a day is when an IEP team decides the measure “is required to address the student’s unique disability-related needs.”
McBride said that Delilah’s shortened school day was never addressed in her IEP. Experts say that’s common, and parents often don’t realize what rights their children have when it comes to accessing a full day of school. Sometimes, as with the McBrides, parents are simply told by a school official that their child will be on a new schedule, but the change is never documented anywhere. Other parents report simply being called almost every day to pick up their child early.
Yet there are instances when a shortened school day is formally written into a student’s IEP. That’s what happened with Catherine Pearson’s son Logan, who was diagnosed with autism at age 2. When he entered first grade in 2008, after a half-day kindergarten program, his school district, in Eagle Point, Oregon, never even attempted a full-day schedule, Pearson said. The school wanted to start with the same hours of instruction he’d been receiving. Doing so would make Logan “more successful,” she recalls being told.
“It’s very sneaky,” Pearson said. “It’s just the way they word things where we trust them. We think, ‘OK, we’ll slowly build up to a full day.’”
But that never happened. Logan continued to receive a partial school day for years as Pearson watched him regress.
Eagle Point School District declined to comment.
School officials will often try to spin the decision to shorten a child’s day as something that’s best for everyone, including the student, according to Diane Smith Howard, managing attorney for criminal and juvenile justice at the National Disability Rights Network. But this kind of language obscures the real reason why districts turn to this option, she said: “They send kids home because they just don’t know what to do with them.”
Smith Howard has been advocating for years to have the federal government address shortened school days. In 2016, following requests from her group, the U.S. Department of Education released guidance that clarified regularly sending a child home early was likely akin to a suspension, and should be reported by the school.
But the government, so far, has stopped short of requiring that any data be collected on how often school districts take this action. Similarly, the vast majority of states do not gather any information about how often they place students on shortened schedules. A Hechinger survey of 36 states found just one, Oklahoma, that requires data on shortened school days to be reported in such a way that state officials can track it.
Oklahoma officials said school districts may incorrectly categorize some information as they report it, but even imperfect data is useful to develop statewide reports and to highlight potential problems worth digging into further. Based on what they find, they may choose to monitor a school district or provide technical assistance.
More states should have such systems in place, said Selene Almazan, legal director of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. “This is absolutely something they should be monitoring,” she said. “It is a denial of a free appropriate public education,” something guaranteed to students in special education under federal law.
Joel Greenberg, senior staff attorney at Disability Rights Oregon, has been pushing for years to get his state to collect information about students on a shortened school day. He says he still frequently sees the problems that Pearson and her son faced and estimates he’s filed a minimum of 20 complaints with the state about similar cases.
In 2016, he tried to get state legislators to propose a bill that, among other things, would require school districts to report the number of students who were placed on a shortened schedule for more than 30 days.
The final law was much shorter and less comprehensive than Greenberg wanted. A proposed mandate to collect data on shortened school days was removed entirely, as were provisions that would have specified the limited reasons a school district could require a shortened day. The law did, however, say that parents must consent to a shortened day and that a student’s IEP team must demonstrate that it considered at least one other option before sending a child home early.
But frustrated the law didn’t go far enough, Greenberg turned to the courts. In 2019, Disability Rights Oregon, among others, filed a class action lawsuit against the state Department of Education alleging that hundreds of students had had their days illegally cut short. One advocacy organization reported receiving calls from nearly 280 parents about this issue from September 2016 to December 2018, according to the complaint.
The Department of Education was unable to comment on pending litigation, said Marc Siegel, communications director. He added that the state was “committed to ensuring the full and appropriate implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act” and that the department had taken several steps to ensure districts followed all laws.
This story about students with a shortened school day was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.
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The Link LonkMarch 25, 2021 at 05:03PM
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'My kid matters, too': Parents ask why students in special education programs are sent home early - USA TODAY
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