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Parents of disabled children who attend Berkeley schools made an impassioned appeal to the school board last week to reform the district’s special education programs. 

Too often students in Berkeley do not receive timely assessments of their special education needs, are placed in classes with inadequately trained teachers or are denied services to which they are entitled under law, the parents argued last week. They represented more than 100 families who are part of the Berkeley Special Education Parents Group (BSPED). 

“In our district, they shut the door,” said BSPED parent Beth Fein. “They don’t want to recognize these kids and they don’t want to serve them. It’s an attitude of ‘we’re not going to do this unless you make us.’” 

The district has over 900 special education students, who have a range of disabilities, including speech problems, visual impairment, learning disabilities, mental retardation, autism and cerebral palsy. Depending on a student’s Individualized Education Plan, they might attend all regular classes or all “special education” classes. But by law, the district must provide “appropriate” special instruction without cost to the parent. 

In response to parent concerns, and in an effort to determine if the roughly $4 million the district spends on special education each year could be better spent, the school board has authorized two independent audits of its special education programs in recent weeks. 

“The issue of special education – the quality of our program, the best use of our personnel, the finances – have been an issue for this board for many years,” Board of Education President Terry Doran said at a school board meeting last week. 

Doran said in an interview that Berkeley’s special education programs have a good reputation overall and even tend to draw parents from outside the area to enroll their disabled children in Berkeley schools. 

“For a small district, we have a very high severely handicapped population,” said Joann Biondi, director of the district’s special education programs. 

Furthermore, said Biondi, although state and federal laws require school districts to provide “free and appropriate public education” to every student with special educational needs, the government only reimburses districts for a little over half their special education costs. And the costs are going up, Biondi added. 

“Statewide this is a very serious issue for school districts,” she said. 

But Fein said that, while Berkeley special education programs have some excellent teachers, the system has been dysfunctional for years.  

“The problem is, from the top down, they don’t have the system or even the right attitude to do what needs to be done,” Fein said. 

Virtually every BSPED parent has watched the district’s special education staff sign off on an Individualized Educational Program for their children – as they are required to do by law – and then fail to implement several pieces of the plan, Fein said. In some cases, the district has taken six months to a year just to complete IEPs, although the law says they must do so within 50 days from the time that a student’s needs are assessed, Fein said. 

Only through persistent advocacy – often with the aid of legal counsel – can parents ensure that their children’s needs are met, Fein said.  

And even for the most organized and determined parents, the burden of such advocacy can be enormous. 

Take, for example, the case of Ann McDonald-Cacho and her husband Bernard. 

“Twelve years ago, my husband asked the question, ‘Is it okay to be a disabled person in Berkeley?,’ Ann McDonald-Cacho told the school board last week, recalling how her husband appeared before the board to ask that it improve handicap accessibility to school facilities.  

“At that time the answer was ‘no,’” McDonald-Cacho continued. “Today, we ask the question again. Is it okay to be disabled in Berkeley?  

“No. Not yet.” 

In an interview, McDonald-Cacho said she has been fighting the Berkeley Unified School District’s Special Education Department for 12 years – since her son entered the district – to get it to comply with the law. 

This past year has been a particularly tough year.  

McDonald-Cacho’s son has cerebral palsy and is quadriplegic. He relies on a wheelchair to get from place to place. But when he began his freshman year at Berkeley High last fall, his parents discovered that there was no evacuation plan for him.  

In other words, there was no procedure outlining who would come to his aid if a fire or other emergency should occur while he was in an upper-level classroom.  

Not until eight months into the school year was a teacher trained to help him in an evacuation, McDonald-Cacho said; this at a school where there were upwards of a dozen fires in the 1999-2000 school year. And there are still unresolved problems with the evacuation plan, McDonald-Cacho said. 

For much of the year, however, McDonald-Cacho was just focused on getting her son to school – with or without an evacuation plan. That’s because, despite records going back 10 years indicating that her son is severely allergic to cats, the district hired a cat owner to work as her son’s “instructional aid” (an attendant who, in this case, needed to be at the boy’s side all day long, moving him from class to class, typing out his answers to teachers’ questions, and more). 

Faced with an alarming allergic reaction by their son, McDonald-Cacho and her husband asked that another instructional aide be hired to work with their son.  

It took the district four months to find a replacement, during which time McDonald-Cacho’s son remained out of school. In a crowning insult, the special education department did not provide him home schooling services during this period, as it was required to do by law, McDonald-Cacho said. 

Searching for the right words to express her frustration, McDonald-Cacho said simply: “It’s hard to take time out of your life when you’re supporting a disabled child and try to battle this stuff.” 

While McDonald-Cacho and other BSPED parents are ecstatic with the school board’s decision to authorize audits of it special education programs, they also plan to file a group complaint with the State Board of Education this summer to bring additional pressure to bare. 

They want to know, among other things, how much money the district spends paying attorneys in its attempt to deny services to special education students. 

Biondi maintained that while the district has a strong financial incentive to find reasonable ways of limiting special education services, special education staff do not take an “adversarial” approach to parents as BSPED members allege. In the vast majority of cases disputes are resolved through simply mediation, rather than through a formal hearing process, she said. 

“A parent comes in and wants the best for a child, and rightly so,” Biondi said. “However, the best is not what we can offer.” 

Still, McDonald-Cacho and others wonder how things might be different if the district and special education parents alike could direct the money they spend on lawyers into special education services instead. 

And as for the need for greater government funding, said McDonald-Cacho: “They should be embracing families and saying, ‘Can we work together, will you advocate with us?’”