FCPS is in big trouble

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Civil Right’s investigation “found that the School Division inappropriately reduced and limited services provided to students with disabilities, based on considerations other than the students’ individual educational needs, and failed to adequately remedy these denials of FAPE.” OCR said it also “identified concerns with staffing shortages and other administrative obstacles that may have limited the School Division’s provision of FAPE, as well as its ability to sufficiently track its FAPE services."

So FCPS was unable to provide FAPE because of staffing shortages and other obstacles - because there was a pandemic.

I have saved an email from the school reading specialist who was working 1-on-1 with my daughter per her IEP that basically said she couldn’t do the 1-on-1 virtually because she was watching her own children.

It still makes me laugh that she put it in writing and thought that was a valid reason to not do her job.

Yup. I’m a lawyer. I can’t imagine telling my clients I can’t write the brief because I’m watching my kids.

Pay teachers like attorneys and they'll be more inclined to make that stretch.

But, they are not attorneys...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’d settle for two grades from 2020-2021 boosted, due to teachers not following 504. I mean, no one followed it, and DD’s learning and grades suffered across the board, and we are still literally paying for it (with $$$ tutoring), but DD doesn’t deserve her GPA to also be harmed by teachers who refused her extensions and workload reductions that were legally mandated.

Any chance in hell they would boost two grades as a settlement? This is her high school transcript, so it actually does matter.

No chance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:MCPS said they would offer compensatory services due to the pandemic.

Technically, they offered some extra hours of "tutoring" with aides or teachers to certain students.

But actually:


It's not working. It couldn't possibly have worked. This is not how disabilities are treated - going for a lengthy period of time with no services or accommodations, then being accompanied a tiny bit more. It doesn't make a dent in the learning delay.

What does reduce the gap?

***Intensive*** work done by parents at home, and/or paid specialists outside of school (yes, the pandemic has increased the inequality gap).

MCPS parents are given the run-around for compensatory services and wait months for something that by definition is not going to help much, when in reality they should be exerting themselves to compensate their kids' accumulated deficits themselves, without waiting.

Please do the same. Don't wait.

+1 MCPS parent of a child with disabilities. We won the State Complaint for a denial of FAPE during COVID. MCPS signed a Resolution Agreement with OCR for additional violations. We advocated and my child was offered compensatory services by the IEP team. Zero hours have yet to be provided by MCPS.

It’s disgusting at how hard the richest public school systems and the lawyers work to deny educational opportunities for students with disabilities. We wished we lived in FCPS because perhaps with the Federal oversight compensatory services will be provided.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MCPS said they would offer compensatory services due to the pandemic.

Technically, they offered some extra hours of "tutoring" with aides or teachers to certain students.

But actually:


It's not working. It couldn't possibly have worked. This is not how disabilities are treated - going for a lengthy period of time with no services or accommodations, then being accompanied a tiny bit more. It doesn't make a dent in the learning delay.

What does reduce the gap?

***Intensive*** work done by parents at home, and/or paid specialists outside of school (yes, the pandemic has increased the inequality gap).

MCPS parents are given the run-around for compensatory services and wait months for something that by definition is not going to help much, when in reality they should be exerting themselves to compensate their kids' accumulated deficits themselves, without waiting.

Please do the same. Don't wait.

This. Search the archives for more info on MCPS compensatory services. They were offered outside school hours, by outside providers, for negligible hours. I'd like to hear from families who were not pressured to reject compensatory services (as some were) and who had a positive experience.

MCPS said they would find a provider which never happened. Then, they told us to get our own provider and they would reimburse $60 per hour. My child needed help so we paid for private services. MCPS then refused reimbursement after receipts were provided. Zero hours provided by MCPS and zero reimbursement from the services they pressured us to pay for.

When is the Department of Education going to investigate MCPS for the denial of FAPE?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Having all those meetings is a colossal waste
of time.
"Compensatory time" can't happen with no staff.
Can they use ESSR money and just cut families checks to pay for private services?

I seriously think they should have been doing this all along. If money isn’t an issue/isn’t as much of an issue, parents can go to therapists that are out of network or don’t accept insurance and get around many of the wait list issues. There were speech therapists, for example, seeing kids in person as early as August/September 2020. Doing a bunch of IEP meetings now isn’t going to solve the fact that kids are badly behind after being out of school for so long in the first place.

People in MCPS have said they were given the run around about compensatory services for months, then finally offered comp services which were basically “an hour a week and the only time we can accommodate you is Saturday morning so if you have other stuff going on on the weekends, tough titty.” I feel like that’s what FCPS is going to do and then shrug their shoulders and say “we did all we could but no one wanted what we were so generously offering!”

MCPS parent here - MCPS never found their own service provider. My child would have been there on any day and at any time offered. They forced us to pay for private services which cost us thousands without reimbursement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Civil Right’s investigation “found that the School Division inappropriately reduced and limited services provided to students with disabilities, based on considerations other than the students’ individual educational needs, and failed to adequately remedy these denials of FAPE.” OCR said it also “identified concerns with staffing shortages and other administrative obstacles that may have limited the School Division’s provision of FAPE, as well as its ability to sufficiently track its FAPE services."

So FCPS was unable to provide FAPE because of staffing shortages and other obstacles - because there was a pandemic.

I have saved an email from the school reading specialist who was working 1-on-1 with my daughter per her IEP that basically said she couldn’t do the 1-on-1 virtually because she was watching her own children.

It still makes me laugh that she put it in writing and thought that was a valid reason to not do her job.

Well there chuckles....I'm sure she had some good laughs from your emails too

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Civil Right’s investigation “found that the School Division inappropriately reduced and limited services provided to students with disabilities, based on considerations other than the students’ individual educational needs, and failed to adequately remedy these denials of FAPE.” OCR said it also “identified concerns with staffing shortages and other administrative obstacles that may have limited the School Division’s provision of FAPE, as well as its ability to sufficiently track its FAPE services."

So FCPS was unable to provide FAPE because of staffing shortages and other obstacles - because there was a pandemic.

The crushing scheduling and paperwork burden of having to do an extra IEP meeting for every single current student and a bunch of former students is going to cause even more burnout among the remaining staff and probably feed the spiral.

I don't know what the answer is. Special ed students were failed during the pandemic. They're being failed now. But there are serious, serious structural problems with IDEA, funding, staffing, all of it, and it's coming apart at the seams. OCR's "remedy" is not a solution to any of it and will probably just make things worse. It'll end up with more empty promises and garbage on paper because they can't hire anybody to fill them.

These were my exact thoughts as I read the e-mail. Sped teachers are already pulled constantly for meetings, as are the gen ed teachers in team taught classes. The Sped meeting calendar is already really full at my school. I have no idea how they will accomodate these meetings. Lost instructional hours for these meetings aside, we dont even have enough sub coverage to cover the classes while teachers are in meetings!

I agree with this. I think this should fall on Gatehouse shoulders. They can use their SPED "gurus" to write all these IEP's. We are drowning as it is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Civil Right’s investigation “found that the School Division inappropriately reduced and limited services provided to students with disabilities, based on considerations other than the students’ individual educational needs, and failed to adequately remedy these denials of FAPE.” OCR said it also “identified concerns with staffing shortages and other administrative obstacles that may have limited the School Division’s provision of FAPE, as well as its ability to sufficiently track its FAPE services."

So FCPS was unable to provide FAPE because of staffing shortages and other obstacles - because there was a pandemic.

I have saved an email from the school reading specialist who was working 1-on-1 with my daughter per her IEP that basically said she couldn’t do the 1-on-1 virtually because she was watching her own children.

It still makes me laugh that she put it in writing and thought that was a valid reason to not do her job.

Yup. I’m a lawyer. I can’t imagine telling my clients I can’t write the brief because I’m watching my kids.

[Anonymous]

Where is the enforcement by the State Department of Education. FCPS didn’t violate the civil rights of students with disabilities in a vacuum.

[Anonymous]

Families have been in the media reporting what was happening to students with disabilities for the past 3 years. What took the US Department of Education so long to take any action? Will they even follow up to protect the rights of students for the implementation?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All they did was focus on ensuring teachers would not have to work and covering their own behinds doing little to know work. Typical government funding employees with no accountability. They need to hold them accountable by providing vouchers to parents or other means

Oh look open FCPS showed up

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is summer school an option for remedy?

last year there wasn't enough staff for summer.

[Anonymous]

If fcps doesn't hire or can't retain staff , give them vocuhers to chose a competent private school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Civil Right’s investigation “found that the School Division inappropriately reduced and limited services provided to students with disabilities, based on considerations other than the students’ individual educational needs, and failed to adequately remedy these denials of FAPE.” OCR said it also “identified concerns with staffing shortages and other administrative obstacles that may have limited the School Division’s provision of FAPE, as well as its ability to sufficiently track its FAPE services."

So FCPS was unable to provide FAPE because of staffing shortages and other obstacles - because there was a pandemic.

The crushing scheduling and paperwork burden of having to do an extra IEP meeting for every single current student and a bunch of former students is going to cause even more burnout among the remaining staff and probably feed the spiral.

I don't know what the answer is. Special ed students were failed during the pandemic. They're being failed now. But there are serious, serious structural problems with IDEA, funding, staffing, all of it, and it's coming apart at the seams. OCR's "remedy" is not a solution to any of it and will probably just make things worse. It'll end up with more empty promises and garbage on paper because they can't hire anybody to fill them.

These were my exact thoughts as I read the e-mail. Sped teachers are already pulled constantly for meetings, as are the gen ed teachers in team taught classes. The Sped meeting calendar is already really full at my school. I have no idea how they will accomodate these meetings. Lost instructional hours for these meetings aside, we dont even have enough sub coverage to cover the classes while teachers are in meetings!

I agree with this. I think this should fall on Gatehouse shoulders. They can use their SPED "gurus" to write all these IEP's. We are drowning as it is.

Parents started emailing teachers about this on Tuesday night. Surely they realized school based staff wouldn’t have answers for them. They were just finding out about this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If fcps doesn't hire or can't retain staff , give them vocuhers to chose a competent private school

I wonder if that’s what they’ll have to do for those who no longer live in Fairfax County.