Parents Contest Adequacy of Disabled Student's Education Plan

If you have a question or concern about special education law, school administration, federal standards, or the overall rights of a student, please feel free to call the expert education law attorneys at Maya Murphy, P.C. in Westport today at (203) 221-3100 .

In the case of Brennan v. Regional School District No. 1, the parents and the school district they sued filed actions under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to appeal a decision in which a hearing officer (HO) held that the district did not provide a student with a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) during the 2003-2004 school year but that the district did provide a FAPE during the 2002-2003 and 2004-2005 years. Both parties requested summary judgment, a preemptive decision by the court in favor of one party over another based on the absence of a genuine issue of material fact.

Issues of Law: Individuals with Disabilities Act and FAPE

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Act, a disabled student is entitile dot free and appropriate public education (FAPE). To make up for the harm caused by the failure to provide a FAPE during the 2003-2004 year, the HO awarded one year of compensatory education and identified the student's 2004-2005 school year at a private school as the compensatory year. Procedurally, this is accomplished by having parents and school administrators jointly develop an individualized education program (IEP) for each year of the student's education. An IEP is memorialized in writing, and it sets forth the specific elements that will be included in the child's education during the coming year. If an IEP does not provide a FAPE, and the parents wish to remedy this by sending their child to private school at public expense, IDEA provides the parents with two remedial mechanism:

1. The first of these is reimbursement, which is set in motion when the parent unilaterally enrolls the student in private school. The parents then sue, and they are reimbursed for their expenses in a given year if the court agrees that the IEP for that year denied a FAPE, and that the private school placement was appropriate.
2. The second IDEA remedy is compensatory education, which is designed to compensate a student who was actually educated under an inadequate IEP. Compensatory education is a prospective award of educational services designed to catch-up the student to where he should have been absent the denial of a FAPE.

Even though the HO found that the proposed individualized education program (IEP) for the 2004-2005 year was appropriate, the HO concluded that the student should have been educated at the private school for the 2004-2005 year. Thus, the private school became the student's stay-put placement as of the date of the HO's decision. Because there was evidence that the student made progress in several subjects and in developing behavioral skills, there was no basis for overturning the HO's conclusion that the student was not denied a FAPE during 2002-2003. The court deferred to the HO's conclusions that the support services offered in the 2004-2005 IEP were reasonably calculated to provide a nontrivial level of educational benefit and that a fully-segregated environment was not needed.

The Court's Conclusion

The court dismissed the district's complaint, dismissed the parents' claim for enforcement of the HO's award, granted the parents' summary judgment motion insofar as the district was ordered to reimburse the parents for tuition at the private school from the date of the HO's decision until the private school was no longer the stay-put placement, and entered judgment for the district on all the parents' claims other than their stay-put claim.

If you have a child with a disability and have questions about special education law, please contact Joseph C. Maya, Esq., at 203-221-3100, or at JMaya@mayalaw.com, to schedule a free consultation.

Source: Brennan v. Reg'l Sch. Dist. No. 1 Bd. of Educ., 531 F. Supp. 2d 245, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 94372 (D. Conn. 2007)