Sunday, April 08, 2001, 12:00 a.m. Pacific School district pays $180,000 to be free of blind, autistic student it considers dangerous by Ray Rivera Seattle Times staff reporter HO I.H. could throw a tantrum so fierce his Seattle school put him in a padded basement room for months.
Seattle School District officials called him the toughest special-education case they’d seen in decades. Students at Chief Sealth High School called him the “kid in the cage.” The blind, developmentally disabled 16-year-old could throw a tantrum so fierce school officials placed him in a padded basement room for months, isolated from other students. Then they paid to make him go away. In a settlement that special-education experts say is both rare and troubling, the district has agreed to pay Kathy Harris $180,000 on condition she keep her son out of the district. School officials say it’s the first time in memory they’ve paid to remove a student from Seattle schools.
The agreement ends a bitter struggle between the district and Harris over how best to serve her son. “They treated him like a monster,” Harris said. “For all the money they spent trying to get him out, they could have made a perfect program for him. They never even tried.” District officials say they faced an impossible situation: trying to serve a boy with an extraordinary combination of disabilities while protecting staff and other students from his violent, unpredictable outbursts. “To conclude this district did not want to serve this student is to ignore the very complex set of disabilities - the dangerousness - this student represents,” said Christopher Hirst, an outside attorney who represented the district. In addition to blindness, the boy has been diagnosed with autism and intermittent explosive disorder, which causes difficulty controlling aggressive behavior. He has the cognitive age of a toddler. Hirst said the boy presented “easily” the most difficult set of challenges he has seen in 20 years of handling special-education cases. But court documents, school records and interviews with special-education experts and those involved in the boy’s care raise questions about the district’s efforts.
Last summer an administrative-hearing officer found the district had violated multiple provisions of the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a federal law that sends billions of dollars to public schools to care for children with disabilities. Among her findings, she said the district: * Improperly suspended the boy, then went months providing “virtually no services.” * Failed to train teachers and instructional aides to safely deal with him. * Made inadequate efforts to design a program for him before deciding he belonged in a special institution. And late last month, Karen Marie Thompson, a guardian ad litem assigned to protect the boy’s interests in court, wrote in her approval of the settlement, “… It is crystal clear that the Seattle School District simply did not want to serve this student.” District officials said the settlement was the best - and least costly - way to resolve an impossible situation. Serving
special-education students is never cheap. Caring for the boy, identified as I.H. in court documents, was especially expensive because he required constant one-on-one supervision. In the boy’s last month at Sealth, for example, the district paid more than $10,000 to a private company that provided instructional assistants and transportation - $1,100 of it to repair van upholstery torn by the boy on his way to school. The law requires public schools to provide special-education services to age 21, and often year-round. Seattle school officials considered sending the boy to a private institution, costing more than $100,000 a year, at district expense. But the facility had no beds available and said the boy’s blindness would put him at risk from other students.
The settlement stipulates that most of the money be placed in an educational trust for the boy. It also wards off a discrimination suit threatened but never filed by his mother. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a district essentially purchasing a child’s removal,” said University of Kansas Professor Rud Turnbull, commonly recognized as the nation’s top expert on special-education law. “From the point of view of the district, it’s probably a very inexpensive way to go, but I would not like to see school districts begin to do this kind of thing because they are really discharging their responsibilities.” The district’s payoff also drew concern from the Council for Exceptional Children, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group that consults with the U.S. Department of Education. “Basically, they’re admitting their negligence and liability,” said Beth Foley, a policy specialist for the council. District officials say it wasn’t a matter of avoiding responsibility, it was a matter of finding the best place for him. The law says students must be served in the “least restrictive environment.” The district felt that was a residential institution, where he could have a consistent environment 24 hours a day.
“Whether this child appeared in Seattle or Omak, he deserved to be served,” said Superintendent Joseph Olchefske. But the boy’s mother disagreed. And district officials claimed they couldn’t find a residential program to take him. Before arriving in Seattle in the fall of 1999, I.H. spent years in the Edmonds district safely sharing a classroom with other disabled students. He’s now in the Shoreline district, where, according to records there, he is in a class with two other boys, where staff is working to improve his communication and daily-living skills. As the state’s largest school district, Seattle also has the state’s largest number of special-education students - about 6,000 - presenting it with enormous financial and educational challenges. And for the most part, it receives few complaints about how it handles these students, and is credited with creating numerous programs to serve them. Next fall it will add six new autism centers to the seven it now has. “Federal law obligates us to serve all kids regardless of the complexity of their needs or disabilities, while at the same time balancing the safety needs of the other students and staff,” said Mark Green, the district’s general counsel. “Obviously in this case we struggled.” For centuries, students like I.H. were often shunted into private institutions or hospitals, or left at home. But in 1975, Congress enacted the federal law now known as IDEA, which requires public schools to serve children with physical, mental and emotional disabilities, even when those disabilities pose a potential danger to themselves, staff and students. I.H.’s 14-month enrollment in the Seattle School District provides a window into the dilemma public schools face in serving special-needs children.
It also raises questions over the measures the district took to shift care of I.H. elsewhere. Kathy Harris, a single mother who runs a résumé business out of her home, declined to be interviewed at length. But she allowed a Times reporter to view her son’s school and court records, pages numbering into the thousands, and allowed district officials to discuss the case. She also shared photographs of her only son, but asked that he be identified only as I.H., as he is in court records. Diagnosed as totally blind at 3 months, I.H. lives in a world of sounds. When happy, he croons to Garth Brooks and flaps his arms. He jangles bells and pulls a plastic bucket over his head to listen to his voice reverberate. His speech is limited to utterances and a few words. He pats his chest for “yes” and responds to simple cues such as “lay down,” “give,” and “time for snack.” When agitated, he is prone to pinch, bite or head-butt anyone around him. His forehead has a permanent ridge from being hammered against walls and windows. Little things can set him off: an unfamiliar voice, an unwelcome demand. The state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), which has worked with I.H. through various programs over the years, traces some of his behavioral problems to misdiagnosed ear problems when he was 5. Because doctors told his mother nothing was wrong, she disciplined him for his tantrums, “when in reality he was in pain,” according to a 1998 DSHS report. Apart from three years in a residential program at the Washington State School for the Blind, I.H. spent most of his school years at Maplewood Center, a facility for children with disabilities in the Edmonds School District.
He shared a classroom there in a separate building with other severely disabled children, who get close to one-on-one supervision from teachers and aides. The curriculum there focused on the most basic life skills: dressing, communicating, using the toilet. He was assigned to crush cans and shred paper to increase his attention span. He swam, received speech therapy and sang. Though progress was slow, staffers reported his outbursts fell from three a day to fewer than three a week, court records show. And though teachers and assistants occasionally suffered cuts and bruises, I.H. never showed aggression toward other children, employees said in court testimony. He once inadvertently injured a student when he threw a toy, court records show. “He’s a sweetheart,” said Sherry Stephenson, an instructional assistant who worked with I.H. the last five years he was at Maplewood. “He has another side of him that is very loving and affectionate and playful.” In 1999, Harris moved to West Seattle and enrolled her son at Sealth. He got off to a stormy start, head-butting a special-education teacher on his first visit. The teacher said the boy also grabbed a knife from a table and went after his mother, who wrestled it away from him. Harris says her son picked up the knife out of curiosity and released it on her cue, “give.” His first day was intentionally short to help him adjust to his new surroundings. But as an aide walked him back to the school bus, I.H. took a swipe at him, scratching him under the eye. The aide, who was hired to work one-on-one with the boy, quit that day. District officials believed his transition into adolescence, the jolt of moving to a new school and changes in his sleep cycle made him more volatile than he had been at Maplewood. Over the next three months, I.H. spent fewer than 10 fragmented hours in school as the district searched for a new aide, then slowly reintroduced him to school. Part of that process involved bus rides in which he wasn’t allowed to leave the bus. On March 28, he wriggled free from his harness on a parked bus and injured another aide and the driver.
The district refused to allow him back on campus. Harris immediately filed for a due-process hearing with the Office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, claiming the district was violating her son’s right to an education. In return, the district obtained a preliminary injunction in May in King County Superior Court to keep the boy off campus. After three days of testimony at a due-process hearing in mid-June, Administrative Law Judge Janice L. Shave found the district’s efforts to serve I.H. “inadequate” and in violation of IDEA. “The school district has not made an adequate effort to devise, implement or provide special-education and related services to the student,” Shave wrote in her 30-page decision. “The services the district did provide were too limited to afford any educational benefit.” Pending an appeal to federal court, the district in September took I.H. back on Shave’s order. A boy who all say needed consistency had now been out of school for the better part of 10 months. A basement room was modified for him, the walls and floors covered with protective mats. The room was well lighted, had a bed, a beanbag chair, toys, children’s books and a desk where I.H. ate meals. The district prepared an individual education plan for the boy, as required by law. But execution of that plan was largely left to a revolving door of ill-prepared substitute teachers - a dozen of them over a period of four months - and employees of a private firm who said their job was to provide security, not education. Michelle Corker-Curry, a district special-education supervisor, said the firm, Professional Network Inc. (PNI) of Lynnwood, was supposed to help substitutes teach the boy from a “menu” of educational exercises.
PNI officials declined comment, except to give a description of the company as a provider of social services. However, three PNI employees - Richard Essex and Phillip Forsell, former long-time police officers; and Peter Verburg-Sachs, who had experience in mental-health counseling but none in special education for the disabled - said they were told to guard the boy and the substitutes, who they said were given no lesson plans. While a special-education consultant to the district, Michael Sanford, occasionally dropped in and offered hints, the teachers were often exasperated, wondering how to reach the child, the men said. Daily logs and summaries kept by PNI staff and teachers support those views. “Some teachers read to him and one got him so far as to throw a ball back,” Forsell said. “But he had needs and desires and I think part of his aggression was not being able to communicate these things.” One of the substitutes, Jim Michael, said the only instructions he received were to monitor and record I.H.’s behavior. He was left on his own to determine how to teach the boy. “My whole reason for being there was to document his failure,” Michael said. “At the very least give me something specific to try. A game, an exercise … something that has a chance to reach him.”
Another substitute, who worked with I.H. for several weeks and asked not to be identified, said: “They told me to sit, observe and record.” Michael said he sympathized with the district’s challenge, and came to believe the boy belonged in a special institution. But he also said the district was not doing all it could to serve the boy. “I kept saying to myself, `Why is this kid in school? He’s not learning anything,’ ” he said. Substitute Gloria Loveless said a Sealth assistant principal told her she
would be “crazy” to take the assignment. She did anyway. Some of the substitutes assigned to I.H. suffered scratches and quit after one day. The boy’s mother and her lawyer objected to the isolation, lack of instruction and constant change of teachers, noting that I.H. missed at least nine days when there was either no teacher or no transportation available. “When (I.H.) attends school, he’s not engaged in tasks or activities,” wrote attorney
Carol Vaughn of the Northwest Justice Project, a free gal-services group that represented Harris, in a letter to the district. “(I.H.) is `learning’ to associate school with unstructured nap and play time.” “We’ve learned if we isolate students from each other, we lose a tremendous opportunity for them to learn from each other,” said University of Oregon special-education professor Robert Horner, a leader in the study of children with violent behavioral problems. “We’ve got to get over the hubris that children only learn when they receive individual instruction from adults.” Jeannette Cohen, an educational consultant hired by Harris, said in court the boy wasn’t the threat the district made him out to be. His blindness precludes him from obtaining weapons, unless by chance, or from targeting his acts of aggression, she said. But district officials said their own expert, psychologist Stephen Sulzbacher of the Children’s Hospital & Regional Medical Center in Seattle, said that placing I.H. among other students would be “ludicrous.” The district would have preferred a permanent special-ed teacher
Yep Dad, I am “lucky” enough to live here. These kind of situations are not rare just not heard about as parents don’t usually go to due process. In my daughters old district the bussed a child that used a wheel chair over an hour each way to a different district because the school was not handicap complient and had only stairs…. no elevator. Just one of many horror stories I have seen or heard of in this area. It makes me sad……..