Special-education parent to school board: ‘Pure ineptness cost my son’

Two parents criticized the special education their children are receiving as they fervently addressed the Muscogee County School Board during its meeting Tuesday night.

And the superintendent agreed the Muscogee County School District’s special education department needs to improve.

Both parents have Young as their last name. Although they aren’t related, they have similar concerns about the way their dyslexic sons are being educated.

Marianne Young said she wants “shine the light on the chronic failure occurring within the program for exceptional students.”

She listed a series of delays. She said they waited for:

▪ More than one year for his teachers to be trained on his assistive technology, only to find the program was obsolete.

▪ Five months for the apps to be installed on the iPad MCSD gave his son to use. But the device proved too old and didn’t work properly.

▪ Six months to gain digital access to his books, “even though I provided the department with the contact information and the instruction on how to request the alternative-format materials from the state Department of Education,” she said.

And when she tried to get her son additional reading interventions, she said, “I was told, ‘He’s making progress.’ This was said to me even though he had been in special education for four years and could read less than 30 sight words.”

She complained to the MCSD special education department’s upper management, she said, but she “pled for hope to no avail.”

To add insult to injury, she said, “I saw somewhere in the news that Muscogee County had a 99 percent approval rating for special education” but she didn’t receive such a survey.

In summary, she said, MCSD’s “inaction, lack of follow through and pure ineptness cost my son precious time, time that we had planned to close his educational gaps.”

She said her grievances are being addressed through the state process. “But I come here because our story, unfortunately, is not uncommon,” she said.

She quoted superintendent David Lewis, who has noted that special education students are MCSD’s only subgroup to have a graduation rate below the state average.

“This group is underperforming in this district despite increases in identification, therapies and technology,” she said. “Considering our experience, it’s not a surprise, but it is unacceptable. I’m here because parents should not have to file complaints or lawsuits or otherwise beg for this district to follow the law. I’m here to call for action so no other parent has to endure the hopelessness and no other child has to pay the cost. Mr. Lewis, I’m asking, please sir, to look into this department, the culture, the processes and find a cause, root it out and take action.”

Lewis responded, “We have known for some time we have a lot to work on in special education. … We continue to work on those areas. We have more work to do. There is no question about it. We’re working on providing training and the resources we need to be successful.”

Lewis added, “I assure you we’ll continue to work on improving. It won’t be overnight, but we are making gradual improvement, and we’ll continue to do that until we eradicate the problem that you indicate is part of special education, because we want all students to be successful. So thank you for your time.”

Then another parent, D.M. Young, spoke to the board about his dyslexic son. He said Muhammad Ali, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs also were diagnosed with dyslexia, which the Mayo Clinic defines as a “learning disorder characterized by difficulty learning due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words.”

“I’d like to think we have the next Steve Jobs sitting in a Muscogee County school right now,” D.M. Young told the board, “but we’re not going to engage that child.”

MCSD uses the Reading Wonders curriculum in elementary schools. He said he called the company and asked for documentation that the program is effective for dyslexic students. He said he was told no documentation exists but the program has built-in “multisensory framework” that has shown some progress, and his son’s teacher can contact Reading Wonders to “fine-tune” the program for him.

“I brought it up at the school,” he said, “and they had no idea. We’ve had this program for five years.”

Last year, he said, his son was approved for assistive technology.

“That’s a fancy term for a laptop computer that sits in his book bag ever day,” he said. “The school doesn’t know how to use it. They don’t know how to implement it into the curriculum.”

When the school district and school board want voters to approve a Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax to help fund education projects, he said, the campaign includes the same three words, “For the kids. The children with learning disabilities, with dyslexia, they’re kids too. Those parents need some help.”

Then he invited school board officials to attend his son’s IEP meeting Wednesday.

“We’d love your input,” he said. “I hope to see you there.”

Lewis didn’t respond, but District 4 representative Naomi Buckner did. Buckner, a special-education teacher in Chattahoochee County, said she would like to attend.

The Ledger-Enquirer contacted D.M. Young to learn who attended the meeting and its result. In emails Wednesday night, he said that Buckner indeed attended. She was the only board member there, he said, along with five teachers, a paraprofessional, the assistant principal, the program director and a child advocate.

He said the meeting “seemed” productive. On a scale of 1-10, he rated his satisfaction with the meeting as a 6.

“I was disappointed mostly with lack of A.T. (assistive technology) progress and the school not wanting to own up to it,” he wrote. “I was pleased with (program director) Natasha Anderson and how she chaired the meeting. We were there for over 2 hours.”

He said Anderson promised she would “get this corrected.”

“We've left previous meetings knowing that we weren't getting anywhere,” he wrote. “I'm cautious about being too optimistic, but I really want to be excited for my son!

“I would love to come to a board meeting and tell the board how great things are going. … Let's hope I get to do that one day!”

This story was originally published February 22, 2017 at 1:28 PM with the headline "Special-education parent to school board: ‘Pure ineptness cost my son’."