The Office of the Child Advocate and Disability Rights Connecticut have jointly filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs against the Connecticut Department of Education, alleging that the department is not fulfilling its role of monitoring schools for children with disabilities.
The complaint, filed on Wednesday, follows a lengthy investigation by OCA and Disability Rights CT that publicly revealed alarming conditions for those children in specific Connecticut schools earlier this year.
The investigation, which took place between 2019 and 2022, looked at a private school system known as High Road Schools. These private special education schools serve students whose home districts are unable to provide appropriate services for children with special needs. But the investigation alleged that staff at the schools were often uncertified, that education was of poor quality, that students were restrained and put in seclusion at a high rate, and that most children in the programs were sent there from low-income communities of color.
Officials at OCA and Disability Rights CT earlier this summer also filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice alleging disability discrimination by four school districts — Hartford, Bridgeport, Waterbury and Stratford — that send their special needs students to High Road Schools.
That complaint is trying to hold the public school districts accountable, according to Sarah Eagan, the state’s child advocate.
The new complaint is targeting the state’s role, claiming that in its alleged lack of sufficient oversight and regulation, the Connecticut Department of Education is in violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which together ensure that children with disabilities have access to quality education and opportunities.
Eagan said local districts told her office that because the state education department approves the special education programs they rely on that approval.
“The state says school districts contract and pay these schools, so they have a responsibility to make sure that they’re adequate. Each points the finger, so this legal complaint is one way to resolve it,” Eagan said.
High Road Schools have in the past refuted the claims made in the investigative report put out by the groups earlier this year. “The final report simply does not accurately reflect the academic and behavioral supports at our schools, which follow state and federal regulations and guidelines. Our programs are based on serving the academic and behavioral needs of our students, making the absence of clinical services referenced throughout the report misleading,” the organization has said in a statement. “We remain committed to collaborating with all stakeholders in the state, including the OCA, DCRT, and CSDE to ensure the highest standards of education and care for our students.”
Fueling the new federal complaint are July 2024 reports by the Department of Education, which reviewed the conditions of High Road Schools in response to the investigation. The reports begin by noting that the authors have looked specifically at some of the key issues raised by the OCA, going “above and beyond the standard review process.”
But the body of those reports fail to go into any detail, positive or negative, about how the schools are doing on some of the OCA’s key concerns, like the excessive use of restraint and seclusion. When Eagan’s office followed up with the department to get more detail and requested the support documents for the reports, such as interviews with staff, none could be produced, she said.
Tom Cosker, an advocate for Disability Rights Connecticut, says that he was surprised that even with the amount of public scrutiny of the High Roads schools in recent months, the Department of Education hadn’t been more scrupulous with its report.
“How do you not do better when you know this stuff is happening and everyone has an idea it might be happening?” Cosker said. “It’s surprising that you wouldn’t take a closer look and do a deeper dive, and if you did, you’d say so, to us and to others.”
The Department of Education released a statement in response to the complaint, which restated concerns about the methodology and legal assertions of the OCA and Disability Rights CT’s original investigation. In response, the Department of Education conducted a “targeted, onsite off-cycle standards review of High Road Schools.”
But in sharp contrast to the OCA’s depiction of these reviews as incomplete and unsupported by evidence, the department statement said the reviews instead “further called into question the reliability and accuracy of DRCT/OCA’s claims regarding, among other things, staffing credentials and hiring practices within the High Road Schools.”
Department officials also said they requested “documentation from the OCA to initiate a formal State Complaint… Despite multiple requests for this necessary information, which would have allowed us to conduct an expansive investigation of the claims contained in DRCT/OCA’s report, OCA chose not to provide it to CSDE.”
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