Tomorrow morning the New Jersey State Board of Education will hold its first-ever Skype public meeting due to COVID-19. The first item on the Board’s agenda will be a proposal by Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet that allows schools, during this State of Emergency, to provide services to students with disabilities on virtual platforms.
Education Law Center will be there to quibble.
And everyone’s right.
Quick backstory: When districts abruptly closed, some shut down all remote instruction due to obtuse guidance from the federal Education Department, since clarified. (See the bottom part of this post.) Now, Repollet says, students with IEP’s can have their services (like speech and occupational therapy) delivered online or on the phone. This “ensures school districts and educational agencies are meeting their legal obligation to provide a free and appropriate public education, as required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), during a period of extended school closures to the greatest extent possible.”
This is a reasonable stance during a crisis. And yet, as the mom of a son with multiple disabilities, I’m worried about cloudy and unenforceable phrases like “the greatest extent possible.” As I’ve written before, not all related services listed in IEP’s (Individual Education Plans) can be delivered remotely. Not all districts will comply —some don’t comply even when there are no emergency school closures. (We see the same uneven pattern in the delivery of home instruction to neuro-typical students.)
Education Law Center is right to be concerned. While I’m a frequent critic, especially concerning its dependence on teacher union money and its support for the Murphy Administration’s efforts to regressively erase accountability and stifle parent choice, ELC’s response to Repollet, written in collaboration with the NJ Special Education Practitioners and the SPAN Parent Advocacy Network, is right on point.
Here are ELC’s four objections:
It’s tough enough educating students with disabilities under typical circumstances. In is harder doing this remotely. It seems to me that ELC’s letter is less about Repollet’s proposal and more about districts that are responding to this crisis with less integrity and grit than one would wish. We can’t trust them so we’ll have to count on the State to verify that New Jersey schools don’t shortchange students who are shortchanged all the time.
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