School Absences Rise as Special Education Fails Students, Suit Says
The New York Times
A class-action lawsuit argues that the New York City school system falls short in helping students with emotional disabilities, leaving them to miss too many school days.
New York City “regularly fails” to provide special education services to students with disabilities, leading to chronic absences, according to a class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday by the Legal Aid Society.
The suit seeks to confront a pervasive problem in the city’s school system, the nation’s largest. Tens of thousands of children may struggle to attend class because of anxiety, clinical depression and other emotional disabilities, the suit says. These students have the right — enshrined in federal law — to have their needs accommodated by their public schools.
But the city’s Education Department “has a pattern and practice” of falling short in providing evaluations, support services and robust plans to help these children attend class, according to the complaint. This failure results in a “systematic, wholesale denial of access to education,” the suit argues.
H.B., a 16-year-old sophomore who is identified by his initials in the lawsuit to protect his privacy, says his anxiety makes it feel like he is watching his classes on “a really old TV” with the signal going in and out.
When he was in sixth grade, his mother sought a special education plan — a legal document that outlines the support services and other accommodations to which a student is entitled. But it took almost the entire school year for him to receive one, the suit says.
In the meantime, administrators at his middle school told him that if he needed to leave class to collect himself, he could sit with the guidance counselor. The counselor later reported his mother to child services for neglect, in a case that was eventually dismissed.
