My 11th grade son’s main disability is with executive functioning disorder. If you can’t penalize a student for his disability, can the school say it can’t make teachers accept late work for full credit? He does the work as soon as he knows what it is, has the right books, sheets etc, but even with the resource room this is sometimes after the due date.
They have a teacher’s contract which somehow prohibits them from requiring teachers to post homework on the expensive e-boards or from requiring them to accept late work. How can they have a teachers’ contract which ends up violating what I believe is the law about not penalizing my son for late work?
Dear Nancy:
Your question involves whether a student who has executive functioning disorder and has an IEP can be denied credit for work that is turned in late as a result of the symptoms of the child’s disability. You also query whether the teachers have the right to refuse taking such work based on union contracts. In general, the fact that a student has a disability which appears to impact on their ability to turn in work on time does not by itself to entitle them to turn in their work late to get full credit. Rather, this is an issue which must be addressed in the Section 504 plan or the IEP.
If the IEP or Section 504 plan expressly recognizes that the child has a problem with late work as a result of their disability, it should provide both instructional or remedial assistance to the student who helped them develop organizational and time management skills, as well as providing accommodations in relation to altering timelines, or reducing and eliminating penalties for late work that is tardy for reasons related to the disability. If the IEP provides for these accommodations, all teachers identified in the IEP who are responsible for the implementation must implement it. If it is not identified in the IEP, it is not legally binding.
Where a school district may have a Union contract that gives teacher discretion in relation to some of these matters, the IEP is legally controlling regardless of the terms of the Union contract. The school district would be responsible for dealing with the teacher and the union and ensuring that the union contract did not supersede the accommodations that the child is legally entitled to pursuant to the IEP.
Topic
Teaching & Instruction