Kylie Felicich had been
trying to get her son — who had an Individual Education Plan, or IEP, for
speech at Mendocino Unified School District’s K-8 school — assessed for special
education services in math for years before administrators conducted an assessment,
she told The Mendocino Voice this summer. Felicich said her daughter could not
read, write, or spell in kindergarten or first grade, but administrators
maintained that she simply needed “a longer runway.” After their experiences
trying to get necessary Special Education services, Felicich’s family would
eventually leave the district for good — and they are not the only ones.
Felicich said one teacher
told her that she could “get in trouble” for advising that Felicich pursue
Special Education services due to her son’s struggles in math. She’d hear the
same thing from another teacher a couple of years later.
“[His teacher] said, ‘I
need to tell you something — your son has a learning disability, and the school
doesn’t want you to know,” Felicich said in a phone conversation with The
Mendocino Voice over the summer. “And I said, ‘Why would they not want me to
know?’ She said, ‘They don’t want to allocate resources to your son. He’s not a
behavior problem. He’s really smart. In other words, they just want to push him
through. But I’m telling you that there’s something really wrong with a kid
that’s this smart that has this specific issue.”
A year later, by an
independent party, Felicich’s son would be diagnosed with dyslexia and
dyscalculia. Parent-reported experiences like Felicich’s prompted a report from
the Mendocino County Civil Grand Jury this summer, which — among other findings
regarding Mendocino Unified’s Special Education program — found that the
district’s failure to provide Special Education services mandated by IEP
agreements to several students led families to file due process complaints.
Then, the Grand Jury found, Mendocino Unified settled these legal disputes with
funds set aside for extraordinary legal expenses in the Mendocino County Special
Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) budget. SELPA’s budget consists of pooled
special education funding from districts around the county; so when Mendocino
Unified settles a lawsuit, any attorney fees paid by the district are
reimbursed from SELPA funds, in the Grand Jury’s words “hold[ing] the district
financially harmless.”
The Grand Jury found that
SELPA has reimbursed $94,190 in attorney fees to Ukiah Unified School District,
Mendocino Unified School District, and the Mendocino County Office of Education
from fall of 2020 to spring of 2022, with $26,750 of those funds going to
Mendocino Unified.
“Families never received
cash settlements,” the Grand Jury reported, “ — they finally received the
mandated educational services they should have received via the IEP agreement.”
The specifics of
Felicich’s arrangement can’t be discussed due to documents she signed when
settling her complaint against Mendocino Unified, but as she told The Voice,
“It would be very challenging for Joe and Sally Smith to get the district to
cover the costs for an Independent [Educational] Evaluation (IEE) without a
lawyer, even though there are some cases where the school district is obligated
to give that student an IEE.”
The Grand Jury posits that
as a small “basic aid” school district — meaning one funded entirely by
property taxes and not by state aid — Mendocino Unified is disincentivized to
provide adequate services to students with disabilities, as these services are
complex and expensive, and the district’s revenue stream is the same regardless
of whether those students remain in school.
The district’s board
disagreed with the Grand Jury’s findings and declined to implement its
recommendations, as outlined in a response document of more than 100 pages that
included documentation of one family’s settlement. The board published this
response ahead of its October 20 meeting, and used part of the meeting as a
forum to discuss what its members saw as a “half-hearted inquiry” into the
school’s program. Superintendent Jason Morse told The Voice that he was happy
with the board’s response and found it thorough.
“I’d like to say that our
district is and has been committed to the success of students with
disabilities,” Board Chair Michael Schaeffer said. “The board takes the
allegations and inaccuracies from the Grand Jury report seriously [and] has
issued a thorough response to the report, which we hope will serve to correct
the record, ease concerns, and restore relationships and trust within our
valued community of parents and students.”
The board said in its
response that only four families had filed due process complaints against the
district in the past decade. The response also disputed claims and methodology
from the Grand Jury report.
The report had alleged
that parents who settled due process complaints were made to sign
non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs. The board declared in its response that
NDAs are not part of the process, but all final compromise and release
agreements resulting from due process complaints include a clause on
confidentiality. Here’s that clause from a 2020 agreement the board included in
its public response, with some identifying information redacted:
By their signatures, the
parties acknowledge that they will carry out the terms of this Agreement, which
shall be maintained as a confidential document by all parties except as
required by law. Specifically, Parents shall not share the terms of this
Agreement with anyone except the Parents’ legal counsel or their accountants.
However, for the limited purpose of resolving questions of implementation and
enforcement of the Agreement, the parties mutually consent to disclosure and
admissibility of this Agreement. This Agreement may be disclosed for the
purpose of obtaining providers to contract with the District for the purposes
of implementation of paragraph 2.1. If Parents or District violate the
confidentiality of this Agreement, then this will constitute a breach as
described in Paragraph 9 of this Agreement.
The Grand Jury interviewed
the Mendocino County Superintendent of Schools, staff from the Mendocino County
Office of Education, the Superintendent and the K-8 Principal of Mendocino
Unified, school district and MCOE business managers, the Executive Director of
SELPA, members of the MUSD school board, parents of MUSD students with IEPs,
and legal counsel. Jurors also reviewed budgets, legislation, the California
School Accounting Manual, the California Department of Education Special
Education Governance and Accountability Study, information from the SELPA
Administrators of California, and the MUSD Local Control Accountability Plan
(LCAP).
In its response, the board
expressed concern that the Grand Jury did not utilize subpoena power to review
due process complaints, settlement agreements, the IEPs themselves, or
California Department of Education compliance data. The board provided examples
of several of these documents in its response.
The board also included
four messages of support from families sent to Superintendent Morse in
September of this year, expressing satisfaction with the districts’ Special
Education program.
“Without the educational
and emotional support, kindness, understanding and love they received from many
people in Mendocino K-8, there is no way possible the kids would be in the
shoes that they are in today,” one person wrote of their custodial
grandchildren’s experiences in the district.
Several former district
parents, though, attended the October meeting to share stories of their
struggles receiving services.
“We had meetings [from
kindergarten] all the way through sixth grade, SST [Student Study Team]
meetings, at least a couple a year,” Crystal Leatherwood said, saying her
daughter would have not been able to graduate from high school without her IEP.
“I had one meeting with the principal, which was just finding solutions to keep
her distractibility down in the classroom. By sixth grade … I was just meeting
with the teachers only. … By this time I’m frustrated. My child is not
succeeding in the classroom. She’s not getting the help she needs. And I
decided to pull my child out of the school. I also had a first grader who I
also pulled from the school, and then I had a child who was going to be
entering kindergarten, and I decided not to let him attend the school, [though]
it would be really convenient. I was talking to a friend about my frustrations
and she mentioned, ‘Why doesn’t your child have an IEP?’ And I said, ‘What is
that?’ I had no idea that this existed. After six years of SST meetings, I
never knew that that was an option for my child, that she could be assessed,
that she could have this help.”
After enrolling her
children at Caspar Creek Learning Community, Leatherwood said her daughter had
been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and had an IEP within three
months.
Sasha Graham said her
teenage son went to Mendocino K-8 for his elementary and middle school, where
he struggled to get evaluated for an IEP despite ongoing behavioral struggles
that impacted his learning.
“I’m an involved parent, a
retired health care provider, and know how to advocate for my son,” she told
the board. “Because of our financial situation, I was able to afford private
testing, professional opinions, and evaluations that for many parents would be
out of reach. Despite all this support, it took over a year to get not only the
appropriate but vital individualized learning plan.”
She added, “In high
school, he is extremely bright, but he still considers himself dumb and a bad
kid.”
Jenifer and Matthew
Westmoreland, with whom The Voice spoke in August, came to the district with
IEPs already in place for both their children; their older son had been
diagnosed with autism.
“We were warned that the
school tried to push kids out that had IEPs, that they didn’t want kids there
with IEPs,” Jenifer said. “We were told stories as we were going into the
school from other parents, like, ‘Good luck with that.’”
The couple said K-8
Principal Kim Humrichouse insisted on an informal plan for navigating their
younger child’s tumultuous drop-off at school, despite his having an IEP.
Meanwhile, administrators continued to attribute their older child’s struggles
to “attention-seeking behavior” although the family was later told that he
should have been receiving speech therapy, occupational therapy, and counseling.
This family has since moved out of the state and is now home-schooling their
son.
“This is all stuff that,
if we had known years before, we could have done something about, but instead I
have a child who can’t even leave the house anymore,” Jenifer said. “And it’s
heartbreaking because when he started at that school, one thing that people
told us all the time was his smile would light up the room. He would skip into
class. He was happy as can be, he was so excited to go to school — and now he’s
depressed and hiding.”
Grand Jury Foreperson
Kathy Wylie told The Voice this summer that as a civil watchdog, the Grand Jury
is used to responses disputing their findings.
“There’s been a shift in
attitude from the responding agencies that have figured out that the Grand Jury
is really not their enemy, that we are really trying to help,” Wylie said. “So
even when an agency says, ‘You’re all wet, you got everything wrong,’ then when
we go back and actually look, we actually weren’t all wet, and they adopted our
recommendations.”
The board said in its
response to the report that it plans to request that SELPA implement two
informational nights in the 2022-23 school year, to outline parental rights and
what supports are available to families in the district. At the October
meeting, board members and Superintendent Morse expressed a desire to hear more
from families about the apparent dissonance between the services they hope to
provide and the experiences reported by some special education students and
their parents.
“I’m hearing [board
member] Mark [Morton] talk about the report and talk about the history of
special education and how it came to be up to the present day,” said Jessica Grinberg,
one of Mendocino Unified’s board members. “But I feel that we rise above the
history. I feel that we need to be more in tune with families, we need to look
at every student, and certainly students with IEPs need to be celebrated with
compassion for the opportunity we have to educate them and help them work
through their struggles. I think we do have amazing staff … and I’m not going
to criticize anybody in this process, but I think there’s a miss. I think that
we’re not in tune to the families in need.”
Morse is focused on
improving Mendocino Unified’s existing programs — including bolstering the
board’s knowledge of special education processes.
“That’s going to be the
focus of our January 5 workshop, as we’ve already determined, training for the board
and just also, what does an IEP look like? How does it happen?” he said at the
meeting. “Our staff comes and goes, and we have a lot of transition. I feel
like our staff last year and this year are, in my 11 years as superintendent,
the best Special Ed staff we’ve had … Our numbers are on par with other
districts our size, as far as number of assessments. So we are assessing kids
at a very huge rate right now. One thing we can do is to keep trying to
improve.”
The Mendocino Voice will
continue to report on Special Education in Mendocino Unified School District.
The Grand Jury report and school board response are available online.
The Mendocino Voice
By Kate Fishman
November 18, 2022
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