Two boys with the same disability tried to get help. The rich student got it quickly. The poor student did not.

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/education/2020/02/09/disability-special-education-dyslexia-doe-nyc-sped-private-placement/4651419002/



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When Congress passed the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975, guaranteeing children with learning disabilities a “free and appropriate education” for the first time, it built in the private placement safety net for parents. In some cases, public school officials acknowledge they can’t accommodate a student and agree to pay tuition at a private school. But sometimes families must sue the school district in order to get the tuition covered.

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In five of the seven states which reported the largest private placement enrollments, white students are significantly overrepresented. In California, Massachusetts and New York, for instance, the share of white students in private placement exceeds the share in public special education by about 10 percentage points. And in both California and Massachusetts, low-income students with disabilities were only half as likely to receive a private placement as their wealthier special education peers. (New York did not release complete income data.)

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Even though it’s technically free, private placement is less accessible to low-income families because securing one often requires lawyers, expensive outside evaluations or other out-of-pocket costs, said Jennifer Valverde, a law professor at Rutgers University who specializes in special education

“Basically, if you’re poor, you’ve got second-class remedies available to you,” she said.

The problem is likely worse than the data even suggest. Most states don’t collect information on students whose (usually wealthy) families place their children in private schools, and then sue the district to reimburse tuition costs for the ones with disabilities. In New York City, more than 4,500 families sued for tuition reimbursement in 2018 alone.

Beyond the disparities in who gets access to private schools, there are glaring divisions in the quality of the schools themselves.

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Indeed, the investigation showed an utterly unregulated shadow school system that often vaults families with means into nurturing, rigorous schools largely unavailable to their poorer peers. The system shunts the hardest-to-teach kids into schools-of-last-resort, which tend to be subject to fewer checks and balances than their public counterparts.

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In New York, competition for the most popular private placement schools has only grown more fierce as several have opened up to students whose families pay their own way or front the tuition, subsequently suing the city for reimbursement. That leaves fewer and fewer slots for parents like Yolanda.

Partly as a result, advocates say, the top special needs private schools on the state-approved list increasingly enroll wealthier and whiter student bodies. Thirty percent of the almost 3,000 students the city recommended for state-approved private schools last year were white, even though white students make up less than 15% of the city’s special education enrollment, state data show.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/education/21education.html

By Joseph Berger
March 21, 2007

Paying for private school is no hardship for Tom Freston, the former chief executive of Viacom, the company that runs MTV and Comedy Central. He left with a golden parachute worth $85 million.

But he says New York City should reimburse him for educating his son in a private school for children with learning disabilities, where the tuition is $37,900 a year. In 1997, his son, then 8, was found to be lagging in reading, though not in math. The city offered the child a coveted spot in the Lower Laboratory School for Gifted Education, a competitive school on the Upper East Side that also has classes for students with moderate disabilities. He would have been placed in a classroom with 15 students, and given speech and language therapy.

Mr. Freston, though, wanted a class of only eight students for his son, in a smaller setting. Without trying Lab, he put his child in the Stephen Gaynor School on the Upper West Side, where students, in Gaynor’s language, display “learning differences.” While the city is required by federal law to pay for private programs for disabled children when it cannot provide appropriate programs, city officials said the Lab program was suitable for Mr. Freston’s son and wanted him to try it. After two years of reimbursing the Frestons for a large part of the private school tuition, the city stopped.

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“While I was fortunate to have the means to provide such an opportunity for my child, many families are not able to do so,” he said. His goal, he added, is to make sure that all families of disabled children “have access to an appropriate special educational program.” He has used the roughly $50,000 in reimbursements he has received to finance tutoring for lagging first graders at Public School 84 on the Upper West Side.

The Freston case is another in the history of the nation’s 32-year-old special-education law that raises uncomfortable questions. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, passed under a different name in 1975, protects disabled children in ways mainstream children are not because historically children with disabilities were ill served. But today it can end up financing top-of-the-line programs for disabled students while students in overcrowded or poorly taught mainstream classrooms do not have recourse to private schools.

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