The parents of a special needs elementary school student have battled for years with Carroll ISD over how to best provide their son the education he legally deserves.
When Jennifer Schutter and Ed Hernandez’s child PJ came home from school one day in fall 2020, his hand was swollen. PJ, an elementary student in the Carroll Independent School District, is autistic, legally blind and has motor and speech delays. Schutter said PJ is basically nonverbal, so he couldn’t articulate what happened to his hand.
CPS cleared the family of any wrongdoing, and to Schutter and Hernandez, the complaint against them seemed like retaliation. When Carroll ISD wouldn’t respond to their latest grievance, the family turned to the U.S. Department of Education. This was just one of the struggles they’d experienced with the district’s special education programs over the years, and things didn’t get much better from there.
The school district has been at the center of controversy over alleged discrimination since at least 2018, as NBC News detailed in multiple reports and a multipart podcast series. That’s the year a viral video came out of the district showing white high-school students chanting a racial slur. As a result, parents, students and graduates started coming forward with their experiences of racism and anti-LGBTQ harassment.
In November 2019, before the broken hand, Schutter emailed the school saying that PJ had come home without his contact lens again. She said they’d spent thousands of dollars on replacements and wouldn’t be able to get any more for a while, so PJ would need eye drops in his right eye every hour. Within a month, PJ was in the hospital with an infection in his right eye. He was on antibiotics for a month to get rid of the infection.
That August, PJ’s parents said, he came home with the right side of his face and eye scratched and oozing blood. Schutter emailed the special education teacher asking how this could happen if PJ had one-on-one supervision. Schutter also said they didn’t have any problems with this while he was learning from home.
The committee determined that PJ’s scratches didn’t happen at school, which was frustrating to Schutter, but she was satisfied that more people would be trained to accommodate her son. She also understood that it was still early in the school year, and she attributed some of the issues to that. By mid-September, the school had also set up a check-in and check-out procedure for PJ to make sure he wasn’t injured when he arrived and left school.
But a police report the family would get in November 2020 told a slightly different story. That month, Schutter filed a grievance with the school, asking for a complete and unredacted copy of the investigative report. She also asked that the school admit that the injury occurred on campus and not at home and that PJ did not have one-on-one supervision at the time of the injury as well.
The report said there was no evidence that anyone hit PJ, that he was struck by an object or that he had fallen from any structure that may have caused the injury. He said parents should have access to videos of their kids without having to accuse the district of neglect or abuse. “I feel that puts the parents in a very uncomfortable position and a very antagonistic approach,” he said. “Right away you have to make an accusation instead of trying to collaborate, instead of trying to communicate what went wrong and how can we fix it. I think that right away it puts the parent in a corner.
The pattern was repeating, he said. “When these incidents happen, hide it, deny it, blame the kid, blame the family,” he said. “Unfortunately, or fortunately for us, we experienced that already multiple times. So I knew what was going to happen.” This is the incident that led the family to file a second OCR complaint with the U.S. Department of Education on July 29, 2022, alleging neglect of PJ.
However, that’s not always the case. “There are differences in districts and there are differences in schools,” she said. “It can very much be a personnel issue. I do think leadership at the top of the district matters greatly, but I think the teachers and principals and the campuses matter a lot as well.”“It takes a strong, educational agency of the state that is monitoring the districts and making sure corrective action is taken when they’re missing the mark,” she added.
Norge Siste Nytt, Norge Overskrifter
Similar News:Du kan også lese nyheter som ligner på denne som vi har samlet inn fra andre nyhetskilder.
‘Our Students Need You’: Houston ISD Superintendent Gives State of Schools Address After Rumors Surface of TEA’s Possible TakeoverA possible state takeover has been looming for Texas' largest school district, Houston ISD.
Les mer »
Alvin ISD receives a book vending machine to help students who don't have access to bookstoresAn Alvin ISD elementary school is all “booked” to reinforce positive student behavior...
Les mer »
Harlandale ISD, grappling with enrollment declines, is talking school closuresSan Antonio’s Harlandale ISD, grappling with enrollment declines, is talking school closures
Les mer »
North East ISD to provide Narcan, overdose treatment, to all schools in effort to fight fentanylNorth East ISD will provide Narcan, a drug meant to reverse the effects of an overdose, to all schools starting this week.
Les mer »
Texas senators file first bill to try to fend off looming HISD takeoverA Houston ISD trustee said some board members plan to confront the Texas Education Agency...
Les mer »