For the past 4 years our local public school has been tolerant of students with IEP’s being pulled out during the school day to receive private intensive audio processing therapy at a wonderful Therapy place. Needless to say, cost and transportation is up to the parent. This year, the Principal has told us that a decree will be coming down from the District Office to mark these students as truant for the hour they miss twice a week. So, we must stop the therapy during school hours. They claim it is against CA state law to remove the child. Has anyone ever heard about this? Any thoughts??
Thank you!!
Re: Educational Therapy Pullout during the school day
They are gaming you and acting like an intimidating bully….I live in CA and went up against the 2nd largest district in CA when I did what Beth is doing last year. I would bring my child in tardy 3 days a week because I had had her in intensive therapy on those days.. They still got their money for her being there because they only marked her tardy, not absent or truant…but in a private letter they wrote to cover their hides they accused me of truancy but they never followed through with their empty threats.. I haven’t seen anything in the lawbooks that state educational therapy is cause for truancy…My advocate encouraged me to do what I wanted to do and to push them as far as I could and to ignore the truancy threats…. I did as she suggested and absolutely nothing happenened to me in regards to being arrested for truancy etc… My advice to you is to do what is in your child’s best interests and sally forth!
I live in Florida not CA but perhaps my experience will be useful to you. For reasons I won’t go into, I decided to partially homeschool my second grade son. The school told me I couldn’t and threatened me with all sorts of things. They told me he would be truant if he was habitually tardy and that a social worker would come visit ect. On the advice of several people from this board, I wrote a very nice polite letter to the principle asking exactly what law prohibited me from doing so. Finally, she called me and told me that there was no prohibition in law.
Anway, you obviously can’t continue with what you are doing with their blessings. But that doesn’t mean you can’t continue. I would suggest you write a letter asking exactly what CA law prohibits you from doing so. I mean parents take their kids to the doctor ect. all the time so I would suspect it is interpretation. In my state, truancy is legally defined in terms of absences which is why they couldn’t stop me even though my son is tardy every day. Our case went all the way up to district attorneys who told the school there was nothing they could legally do to stop us. All we got was a form letter telling us that our son had excessive absences.
Beth