Parents of children with disabilities complained to Columbus Municipal School District trustees Monday their children are not receiving special education services in a timely manner — or at all.
The board of trustees called the special meeting Monday evening at Brandon Central Services as an open forum to discuss the state of the district’s special education (SPED) program, and the capacity crowd in the meeting room did not hold back their frustrations.
In response to the complaints, CMSD Office of Special Programs director Donna Jones — who oversees SPED — said the program is meeting all federal deadlines and focusing on students’ needs. Sometimes, Jones argued, parents want more services than the district can provide.
“When we talk about the services, we’re talking about the need,” she said. “Does the child need it … to be as productive as a child without disabilities?”
To get individualized services that special needs students require, an individualized education program (IEP) committee — a committee of parents, teachers and other school employees who specialize in special education — recommend an assessment to determine whether the child needs those services, Jones said.
Normally a school psychologist would perform the assessment, Jones said, but the last psychologist the school employed was released from her contract.
District Superintendent Philip Hickman said he didn’t know how long ago that was.
Since then, the district has contracted the services to Mississippi State University, which sends interns from the university’s graduate program twice per week to meet with students and handle assessments, Jones said.
She said that while wait times for those assessments are long, they are all within the federally mandated 60-day time frame. The district, by law, has up to a year to enact an IEP plan for a student once one is established.
“I apologize, but instead of having nothing, that’s how we make do,” Hickman said.
But parents said the wait time has been a constant source of frustration.
Terri Doumit, a parent of a middle school SPED student, said it took the full year from the time an IEP committee decided her son needed testing to get a behavioral plan in place for him.
Joe Wilson, the parent of an eighth grade son with a cognitive disability, was also frustrated about the length of time it took to get his son’s behavioral plan in place. But he said it even took some hassle to get an IEP meeting together in the first place.
At the first IEP meeting he and his son’s mother scheduled, there was no IEP committee, he said.
“I took off from work,” he said. “My son’s mother took off from work.”
Board president Jason Spears said it might be time to “reevaluate” the district’s contract with MSU.
Funding
A state audit in October 2015 found the district to be out of compliance in 21 areas of the district special education services. Among those were that the district was giving services to students that didn’t apply to their individual disabilities, which Jones said is an inappropriate use of funds according to federal law.
Essentially, she said, the district was rubber-stamping anything parents asked for instead of basing services on individual assessments.
She added the services that were or were not appropriate varied depending on the students’ individual disabilities.
Services for special needs students have to be educational, based on that student’s specific disabilities and backed by data from assessments, Jones said. She said her primary goal was to ensure the SPED program is in compliance with federal law.
But parents felt funding and lack of resources was the reason their children were no longer getting individual services they had gotten before.
Wilson said he’d been told there wasn’t enough money to get his son certain services. Doumit said her son didn’t get services because assessments determined he was too low-functioning for them to help him — but she said she felt he and other students were simply being written off because of a lack of funding and resources. She said her son had gotten those services, such as speech therapy, in the past.
“I’m not writing him off and I do not agree with that assessment,” she said.
Spears said the district has enough money to supplement the SPED program and asked Jones why she hasn’t come before the board to ask for more. Jones said the Office of Special Programs is adequately funded by federal money distributed by the Mississippi Department of Education.
Spears didn’t seem convinced. He suggested more funding might attract more qualified candidates for the empty school psychologist position.
But Jones said funding was not the problem either with services or for the empty psychologist position, which she said remains empty because no qualified candidates are applying.
District should ‘bend over backwards’
While trustees took no action Monday, board members said the issues parents raised need to be addressed going forward.
“There seems to be a breakdown in communication,” said board member Currie Fisher, who had raised concerns about an “adversarial” relationship she had heard of between parents and Jones’ office. “… Is there some kind of way that we can address … how we respect parents’ concerns?”
She said the district and board should “bend over backwards” to make sure parents understand why Jones’ office does what it does.
“The parents need to be part of this conversation,” she said. “There’s something broken and we need to fix it.”
No representatives from the district’s SPED advisory committee — which Hickman appointed at the board’s behest last year — spoke at the meeting.
The committee’s purpose is to listen to parents and educators in the district and make recommendations to the board about SPED issues. However, since the committee was formed last fall, it has not appeared before the board.
Board member Angela Verdell asked parents to use the advisory committee in the future to express concerns or air complaints about the SPED program.
“We could have already received that information (before) tonight,” she said.
Doumit said she attended the committee’s meetings, which are held once a month, last year and that they were “trying to get things off the ground.” She did not have any complaints with the committee that she brought before the board.
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