Anyone been reimbursed yet from FCPS?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Its interesting to me that out of our completely random population of parents on here, almost everyone was sent an incorrect, reduced amount AND almost everyone had to submit their receipts multiple times. Assuming everyone is sending things in electronically, that makes no sense. How do electronic submissions get "lost"? Where does it cross over from incompetence to maliciousness?

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

They should hang this up in Gatehouse lobby

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I found this online.

What was interesting to me was that the amount was so high (I am in two different special ed parents group--my kid is 18 and has cycled through a lot of schools--and no one who was getting financial reimbursement was getting anywhere near this much and one of the groups is parents of very, very impaired dc).

Almost always these findings go in favor of the school system. Its really unusual for FCPS to lose like this! I can't overstate how unusual this ruling is.

I haven't heard of any other parens being asked to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement-this was really strange to me.

My kid has had an IEP since age 3 and is severely disabled. I would say 90% of her teachers have been wonderful people trying to do impossible jobs usually with little support. We have dealt with Gatehouse staff many times on many different issues and they are 100% of the time, unbelievably slow and frankly incompetent. I don't know where they find these people.

https://specialeducationaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024.02.26-VDOE-LOF_Redacted.pdf

So October 2023---> January 2024 was illegally slow response rate by FCPS. But parents on here are just getting reimbursed based on meetings held in spring of 2023?
That's crazy.

In my experience 90 percent of SN parents are just trying to get thru the day and have low expectations of fcps admin. Hence all the parents on here who just accepted being shorted reimbursements.

10 percent are squeaky wheels like the parent who filed a complaint. There is no relationship between the extent of the child's disability and the squeakiness of the wheel. I don't know any parents who asked for mileage to/from their childs therapist, for example.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Its interesting to me that out of our completely random population of parents on here, almost everyone was sent an incorrect, reduced amount AND almost everyone had to submit their receipts multiple times. Assuming everyone is sending things in electronically, that makes no sense. How do electronic submissions get "lost"? Where does it cross over from incompetence to maliciousness?

Hahaha, i asked the very same question----how does an email with receipts atttached get "lost"---when they asked me to resend *to the same email address*.

No one ever answered my question.

[Anonymous]

It’s definitely not malice or intentional, sure it’s fun to make it seem like everything is some John Grisham-esque deep conspiracy, but the truth is those who do this work A). have no personal stake in it (what do they care if a check says $50 or $500) B). are definitely not compensated well enough to participate in something like that C). are aware everything they write is FOIA-able, and last but not least, D). are in some cases FCPS parents of Special Education students themselves.


I always crack up at these threads that paint county employees as some nefarious childless beings imported from a foreign place, as if they aren’t also sending their kids through FCPS.


It’s crazy in this area, of all areas, that people don’t recognize that a large bureaucracy is just naturally prone to large oversights where different departments just pass the buck going “that’s not our responsibility”.


As far as I can tell the positions tasked with being compliant to this ruling didn’t really exist prior to the ruling itself. The few contacts they had provided early on seemed to turnover pretty quickly (not a shocker the position probably sucks).


There’s very obviously a lot of potential cracks for things to slip through in how this is as run. I can assure you, the county that had to do this because a lawsuit didn’t just turn back around and go “okay, how do we defraud s as ll those eligible” and get a litany of underpaid public servants to jump aboard.

[Anonymous]

That is a nice theory but after dealing with FCPS for 10 years- it has to be malicious because no organization can be so incompetent in so many ways.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s definitely not malice or intentional, sure it’s fun to make it seem like everything is some John Grisham-esque deep conspiracy, but the truth is those who do this work A). have no personal stake in it (what do they care if a check says $50 or $500) B). are definitely not compensated well enough to participate in something like that C). are aware everything they write is FOIA-able, and last but not least, D). are in some cases FCPS parents of Special Education students themselves.


I always crack up at these threads that paint county employees as some nefarious childless beings imported from a foreign place, as if they aren’t also sending their kids through FCPS.


It’s crazy in this area, of all areas, that people don’t recognize that a large bureaucracy is just naturally prone to large oversights where different departments just pass the buck going “that’s not our responsibility”.


As far as I can tell the positions tasked with being compliant to this ruling didn’t really exist prior to the ruling itself. The few contacts they had provided early on seemed to turnover pretty quickly (not a shocker the position probably sucks).


There’s very obviously a lot of potential cracks for things to slip through in how this is as run. I can assure you, the county that had to do this because a lawsuit didn’t just turn back around and go “okay, how do we defraud s as ll those eligible” and get a litany of underpaid public servants to jump aboard.

Its just strange to me that the incompetence is exactly the same in every case: (1) the family was shorted X amount from what FCPS agreed to pay, in a way such that amount made no sense and (2) FCPS asked for receipts to be electronically submitted multiple times per family. Law of averages would be some people got overpaid, some people only sent in receipts once, etc.

[Anonymous]

Maybe they are taking taxes out of the reimbursements?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I found this online.

What was interesting to me was that the amount was so high (I am in two different special ed parents group--my kid is 18 and has cycled through a lot of schools--and no one who was getting financial reimbursement was getting anywhere near this much and one of the groups is parents of very, very impaired dc).

Almost always these findings go in favor of the school system. Its really unusual for FCPS to lose like this! I can't overstate how unusual this ruling is.

I haven't heard of any other parens being asked to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement-this was really strange to me.

My kid has had an IEP since age 3 and is severely disabled. I would say 90% of her teachers have been wonderful people trying to do impossible jobs usually with little support. We have dealt with Gatehouse staff many times on many different issues and they are 100% of the time, unbelievably slow and frankly incompetent. I don't know where they find these people.

https://specialeducationaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024.02.26-VDOE-LOF_Redacted.pdf

+100 million.

[Anonymous]

I didn't realize there was a discussion on this until i saw it on recent topics. I usually just go to the SN board.

We were reimbursed for copays for 9 sessions of speech therapy, which was all we requested since the virtual speech sessions were not effective for my non-verbal (at the time) young child, and I didn't have receipts for the other therapy sessions. Total was low three figures. There was no disagreement at the IEP meeting and I had brought the receipts to the meeting so they were submitted in I think it was May 2023? When I emailed in fall 2023 to ask about reimbursement, I was told they didn't have any receipts from us, so I resent. Then I emailed again around Feb 2024 and they said I needed to resubmit the receipts. So, I sent in the same receipts three times.

We were then sent 5 different small checks over the course of this past summer, summer 2024. The total of all 5 checks was $XXX.55.

I keep wondering if that last check for $XX.45 to finally get back the total we are supposed to get is ever going to show up but it looks like we are SOL on that!

[Anonymous]

Why would they mail 5 separate checks, totalling the wrong amount...I have so many questions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why would they mail 5 separate checks, totalling the wrong amount...I have so many questions.

Why? Because they suck and hate families and children.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I found this online.

What was interesting to me was that the amount was so high (I am in two different special ed parents group--my kid is 18 and has cycled through a lot of schools--and no one who was getting financial reimbursement was getting anywhere near this much and one of the groups is parents of very, very impaired dc).

Almost always these findings go in favor of the school system. Its really unusual for FCPS to lose like this! I can't overstate how unusual this ruling is.

I haven't heard of any other parens being asked to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement-this was really strange to me.

My kid has had an IEP since age 3 and is severely disabled. I would say 90% of her teachers have been wonderful people trying to do impossible jobs usually with little support. We have dealt with Gatehouse staff many times on many different issues and they are 100% of the time, unbelievably slow and frankly incompetent. I don't know where they find these people.

https://specialeducationaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024.02.26-VDOE-LOF_Redacted.pdf

+100 million.

This behavior trickles down we have a lot of incompetent admin at school levels….or just a blatant shrug of the shoulders who cares attitude.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why would they mail 5 separate checks, totalling the wrong amount...I have so many questions.

Why? Because they suck and hate families and children.

I worked in finance for a school district years ago. The ONLY even semi plausible explanation for multiple checks in incorrect amounts is that they have somehow divided up the reimbursement work by date, and not by student. So person A is handling all reimbursements for 2020, person B for 2021, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Its interesting to me that out of our completely random population of parents on here, almost everyone was sent an incorrect, reduced amount AND almost everyone had to submit their receipts multiple times. Assuming everyone is sending things in electronically, that makes no sense. How do electronic submissions get "lost"? Where does it cross over from incompetence to maliciousness?

Hahaha, i asked the very same question----how does an email with receipts atttached get "lost"---when they asked me to resend *to the same email address*.

No one ever answered my question.

No one answers any questions in fcps. They either ignore or deflect.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why would they mail 5 separate checks, totalling the wrong amount...I have so many questions.

Why? Because they suck and hate families and children.

I worked in finance for a school district years ago. The ONLY even semi plausible explanation for multiple checks in incorrect amounts is that they have somehow divided up the reimbursement work by date, and not by student. So person A is handling all reimbursements for 2020, person B for 2021, etc.

We are still awaiting a reimbursement check. The amount is less than $500. Their whole process is comically inept. There is no disagreement on the amount or anything else: its speech therapy copays the IEP team agreed to cover. For some reason, it just seems impossible for FCPS to actually cut a check and mail it.

The two checks people are being sent represent two different periods of time: Before June 2022 and after June 2022.

I have no explanation---other than incompetence---for all the wrong amounts.

If FCPS is this incompetent and sloppy with all their finance and accounting, I'm not sure how the system even gets thru the day.