August 5, 2008

Delicate Subjects- How Far to Go

You Facinate Me So

I have a feeling that beneath the little halo on your noble head
There lies a thought or two the devil might be interested to know.
You’re like the finish of a novel that I’ll finally have to take to bed.
You fascinate me so!
I feel like Christopher Columbus when I’m near enough to contemplate
The sweet geography descending from your eyebrow to your toe.
The possibilities are more than I can possibly enumerate
That’s why you fascinate me so.
So sermonize and preach to me.
Make your sanctimonious little speech to me.
But oh, my darling, you’ll forgive my inability to concentrate.
I think I’m dealing with a powder keg that’s just about to blow.
Will the end result deflate me?
Or will you annihilate me?
You fascinate me so!

If it were only about the years of cases, this would be an easy blog to do. If it were just about the politics and players in special education- harder, but still doable. Mixing the two makes the stories harder to tell. In documenting the past and looking toward the future of special education, there is a separate, gigantic gray area of corruption, contracts, and discretionary funding from state and federal governments that pay off the people who make sure nothing changes. Of all of the trouble I’ve been in over the last three decades, the only time somebody threatened to kill me was when I started to question where the money went. There may be no greater pork barrel in U.S. government than the bottomless pit of grants that fund school, state and national special education projects. It makes the Alaskan bridge to nowhere look like a rocket launch to the moon.

In 1980 I discovered the State Plan- the grant application each state makes to the federal government with specific assurances about compliance. It documented problems and established a budget to implement state goals for improvement of special education. Part of that plan was a Parent Advisory Committee who was required to do a Needs Assessment of special education in the state. By 1980 I knew that there was no parent organization in New Jersey that trained anybody and did no needs assessment. When I finally got hold of the State Plan and read it, lo and behold- it relied on unnamed parents on a state advisory committee. I analyzed the data it contained and discovered that the numbers were bogus. Nothing matched what was supposed to be supporting documentation. I filed a complaint with OSERS, providing proof of fraudulent numbers and assurances. The New Jersey plan was questioned for the first time and I was asked to come to Washington to discuss the allegations. My key concern was a mythical parent- training group called Project Involve led by a Mary Callahan. The state plan described all that this group was supposed to be doing at the very time that I was building the Parent Information Center. Project Involve was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for training and alleged workshops that could not be confirmed. All of us at PIC were working for nothing out of our houses while somebody was being paid a fortune to do nothing. We soon learned that this was just a tiny tip of the iceberg that attempted to freeze you out of you got too close.

About 20 of us went to the first of what was to be three public hearings on the State Plan during 1980. At the first public hearing we handed out the law that described what the State Plan was, how it was to be developed, and who was to develop it. We had written and distributed questions to be asked, sitting quietly and politely until the lady representing the state finished her presentation. A few in the group had created a five by six foot diagram that attempted to develop a flow chart of who the people were and what they did as described in the State Plan. When it was their turn, they taped the diagram to the wall and used it as a prop to ask questions. Before they began, they asked the lady if the flow chart was correct. She froze where she stood, looking at the wall. Then she burst into tears and fled the room. In a few minutes, somebody else came into the room and said that the hearing was completed and that the next two were canceled.

The two biggest areas that bothered us was the parent training and involvement piece, as well as something called The Comprehensive System Of Personnel Development (CSPD). By 1980 everybody on the ground knew that the schools had no idea how special education was supposed to work. They made it up as they went along. So we were amazed to learn that they were to actually receive training in the law on a yearly basis.

The law controlling the development of State Plans was very specific. After a comprehensive Needs Assessment, the State and each local school district was to update their training for the State Plan in order to keep up with new discoveries, methodologies, and case law. We soon learned that the people hired to upgrade skills with the grant money were the same people already working in the school districts and the state who opted for Dumb and Dumber as they went along. It is worse today because the specificity of what was to appear in the state plans has weakened with each reauthorization.

After I filed the first lawsuit against New Jersey in 1985,alleging fraud in its special education system and Project Involve, everything changed. I now had discovery rights to demand documents and information that were denied before the suit. One of the things I asked in the Interrogatories was “Who is Jaynee LaVecchia?” That was the name of the person in the Keane administration who had signed off on the State Plans in question. While waiting for a reply to the interrogatories, a friend of mine who was in the New Jersey Assembly took me on a tour of the State House. We approached the side door about 4:30 PM. A small, dark haired woman was coming out. He went up to her and said, “Ms. LaVecchia, I’d like to introduce you to Marilyn Arons.” She took one look at me, and immediately turned and ran-walked to her car in the parking lot. “I don’t have time to talk”, she said. My friend said, “Boy, I’ve never seen her do that. But you know she is Tom Keane’s attorney and a very busy lady. He never makes a move without her. She is where the power is.” He had no idea about my lawsuit or my inquiry as to who Jaynee LaVecchia was. But she certainly knew. A few weeks later, the Attorney General’s office sought a Protective Order from the federal court concerning specific questions in my Interrogatories that the State did not want to answer. One of them was “Who is Jaynee LaVecchia?”

Our paths were to cross again. Ms. LaVecchia was appointed the Director of the Office of Administrative law and became Judge LaVecchia. In the early 90s I had one case before her, a test case concerning a gifted boy with severe disabilities. I was worried about her impartiality and raised that on the record. She said she had no recollection of the past, except her support of nonlawyer practice in New Jersey and the formulation of the rule that permitted it. She was a fair and careful judge. But the taint of the past never left my mind, nor did the irony of her assignment to my case. She now sits on the New Jersey Supreme Court.

The State Plan in special education is a critical document through which to understand how hundreds of federal programs piggyback off of one another. This is especially true in personnel training. For every federal pot of money given to states, there must be a grant application explaining how that money will be spent. Whenever the grants require a training component, they refer back and incorporate by reference the special education State Plan. In the recent Fort Lee case (See the My Last Trial blog.) I requested a copy of their State Plan. Their attorney refused to provide it and the State would not compel him to provide it. After many formal requests with the State to force the Fort Lee Board of Education to produce this public document, New Jersey said it had no such authority. Currently all State and Local District Plans are filed electronically, with none of the required information that was previously available. The only way to get statistical information, CSPD information, etc. is to have the district make a copy of the one they have on file. It turns out that this is NOT the same as the one filed electronically.

So special education is more complicated than most understand. Nonlawyer stuff doesn’t hold a candle to the money laundering stuff. But you have to be careful and know how far to go and when to stop if you want to survive. After 30 years, maybe a billion dollars has been wasted on discretionary funding on special education projects and grants. What good has that money done?

Last week I went to an eligibility meeting in a local district for one of my 3 year olds who is leaving early intervention. The family is bilingual, whose native language is Spanish. They have taken a parent training class with me for a year and knew that no placement could be discussed until the IEP had been developed. The case manager sat across the table from them with a blank IEP form in front of her. She said, “We don’t write the IEP until your child is in our program. Then after 30 days we’ll write the goals and objectives.” The mother and father both gasped. “No IEP?” , they said. “It’s our district policy and you can also check with the State.” The IEP team members were all young enough to be my grandchildren, having no idea who I was and nodding their heads in agreement with their chairperson. I said that the parents were correct and that we needed to proceed to write the individualized goals and objectives before discussing placement. They brought in their assistant superintendent. “What’s the trouble here? Who are you?” I explained. “Well, the Director of Special Education won’t be back until next week. We’ll have to reschedule the meeting.” So much for 30 years of personnel training!

It’s always been a delicate balance, watching people go up or down the political ladder, while trying to do what you can for kids. People used to look at me sideways and say- “Be careful or you’ll be wearing lead boots.” So there are stories I’ll never tell. But those I can share are good enough.