Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

A special education teacher walks down a hallway with her student in a Northern California school.

Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

A special education teacher walks down a hallway with her student in a Northern California school.

Miriam Kurtzig Freedman
Apr 20, 2020

Us Secretarial assistant of Educational activity Betsy DeVos is weighing whether to recommend that Congress provide waivers to schools and states on some requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Teaching Act.

I urge her to recommend necessary and temporary flexibility during this unprecedented public health crunch.

At issue is whether targeted and specific requirements and procedures should be relaxed. They should exist. Specific and temporary flexibility should concluding until schools reopen for all students. Examples of such flexibility may include easing timelines for meetings, services, etc; easing meeting omnipresence and other coming together requirements; assuasive different service delivery approaches and halting due process claims, including those that ascend during the current crisis.

In normal times, many regulations are crushing to schools, with compliance issues often leading to litigation and the fear of litigation.

Now is non normal. Schools are struggling to provide even minimal education for all students. They need freedom to function as best they can. As long equally general didactics students receive no instruction, or a stripped-downwardly version of what was, students with disabilities should besides.

Without flexibility, schools are placed in an impossible state of affairs that hampers their ability to manage and brainwash all students — including students with disabilities — during this crunch.

The IDEA Deed — now 45 years erstwhile — provides students with disabilities (14 percent of our nation's students) with an individual entitlement to a complimentary appropriate public education to access and acquire what the law calls "the general curriculum." They are entitled to specialized didactics and individualized services, amongst other rights that their parents tin enforce through the law. The general curriculum is supposed to help all students gain bookish, social, behavioral and emotional knowledge and skills. Most (eighty to xc percent) students with disabilities have mild or moderate needs and are more often than not educated in general didactics classrooms.

Special education is the only entitlement in our public schools. Information technology's a authorities program that provides eligible students with disabilities and their parents with rights and other benefits — no affair the circumstances. It's a big bargain.

Today, we are in a national crisis because of the coronavirus pandemic. The educational circumstances for more than 50 million public school students nationwide are upside down. Many schools are closed with no learning or far less learning going on, approaches that themselves enhance equity challenges. During this crisis, nosotros know that many students will lose skills, regress academically and may develop other challenges, likewise. Schools are in a about complicated and challenging legal situation.

Then, what well-nigh the claim that students with disabilities are entitled to a complimentary and appropriate public pedagogy — even amid a pandemic? While the Department of Education has urged "flexibility," it has no power to enforce that. Congress does.

With congressional "flexibility," schools will be able to work without rigid rules, deadlines, meetings, assessments and other requirements and, hopefully, without the ever-present fear of litigation. Also necessary is the need to halt claims that schools are non implementing the legal rights of students with disabilities during school closures.

What nearly the most vulnerable students with disabilities, students who are among the 10 to xx percentage who take astringent or profound needs? Professionals close to the scene will need to reply: If students are in danger or in unhealthy settings, it'southward fourth dimension to mandate that other government agencies step upwards. This crunch calls for inventiveness and solutions to meet on-the-ground needs — not enforce rights written in another era.

We already hear claims that special education students should receive timely meetings, procedures, etc. and, when the crunch ends, compensatory services to counter their expected regression — ignoring the fact that all students will, undoubtedly, regress. Call up, because of the entitlement, special education students have the right to expect that their admission to a full range of public educational services will continue; others don't.

Such claims highlight the need for congressionally mandated flexibility as an appropriate response for every bit long every bit the general curriculum remains upended. The statement that legally required services are to be provided no matter what other students get goes far beyond what the IDEA Human action envisioned. The law was built on fairness and equity for all — non their absence. Consider how trying to proceed with by and large business concern as usual for students with disabilities volition go over with general education parents whose kids are sitting at home.

Congressionally authorized flexibility is necessary to span this hard time. When schools reopen, we'll have plenty of fourth dimension to rethink next steps. Extreme circumstances crave an farthermost response. Such flexibility is a good beginning footstep.

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Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, a former teacher, is a lawyer and author of "Special Education 2.0 — Breaking Taboos to Build a NEW Education Constabulary," (School Police Pro, 2017).

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