Use of Public Aid to Send Dyslexic Girl to Boarding School Questioned

The Ventura Unified School District has agreed to send a teen-age girl to an expensive Massachusetts boarding school for dyslexic students, an unusual move that has raised questions within the district over the appropriate use of public funds for private education.

The confidential arrangement was approved last fall by the Ventura school board, which did not endorse the plan, but hoped that it would avert a lawsuit that the girl’s parents had threatened if she were not placed in the $25,000-a-year facility.

The parents, a Ventura pediatrician and his attorney wife, contended that their 13-year-old daughter qualified for the special school under the federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act, a 1975 law that authorizes private care for disabled students if public programs are not adequate.

Dyslexia, a learning disability that often causes a person to scramble words or view them backward, is usually battled with intensive instruction in basic reading skills. The Landmark School, a private facility near Boston that the family requested, is perhaps the most heralded school in the country for such disorders.

Some Object to Use of Tax Dollars

But The Times has learned that some district personnel strongly objected to the settlement as a misuse of tax dollars.

In addition, court records reveal that the district spent months battling the family over the right to test the girl. The dispute was the subject of a hearing before an administrative law judge in February, 1988, and also prompted the school district to bring the case before a Ventura County Superior Court judge in April.

Several school personnel, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified, contended that the girl could have been well-served by the special-education classes that the district provides for hundreds of other dyslexic students.

Moreover, they argued that the state-mandated procedure for making such placements was bypassed. The girl had spent the previous two years in a private Ojai school, they said, yet the decision to send her to Landmark was made without a full assessment or recommendation from the district’s own special-education experts.

Finally, these school personnel complained that the girl’s parents were able to bully the school board with the threat of litigation, while parents of other children who might benefit from such care have neither the expertise nor the resources to demand it.

“We all work with kids every day who are severely learning-disabled and could benefit from a private situation,” one source said. “But their parents don’t have the wherewithal to know how to fight the system. . . . If you have a legal background and a little money to fight, then do you just get whatever you want?”

The girl’s parents, Dr. Theodore W. Kleiman and Melodie M. Kleiman, who is chief assistant county counsel, declined to discuss the case. But the Kleimans, who live next door to school Supt. Cesare Caldarelli Jr. in a neighborhood near Ventura College, expressed shock that school personnel were revealing details about their daughter, who has been attending Landmark since September.

“This is a total invasion,” Theodore Kleiman said in a telephone interview. “We’re absolutely abhorred that these people would violate that trust.”

Caldarelli, who also declined to discuss specifics of the case, said he has never discussed it with the Kleimans in a social setting. “Once I found out I was moving next door, I established a separation of personal and professional relationships,” said Caldarelli, who was named superintendent of the 15,000-student district last summer. “That was essential in the fair hearing of this case.”

He called the settlement fair and impartial. To assist in the decision, he said, he convened a neutral committee composed of an attorney, a parent and a representative of the state Department of Education, all of whom recommended that the district send the girl to Landmark.

He added that the district is paying only 30% of the school’s cost, with the rest being paid by the state Department of Education. After deducting the amount that would have been required to keep the girl in Ventura, the district is left with a bill of about $6,420--far less than what it would have taken to battle the Kleimans in court, Caldarelli said.

‘Comfortable With Resolution’

“I am extremely comfortable with the process and the resolution,” Caldarelli said. “It has been done independent of arbitrary or capricious judgment on the part of any one individual.”

The placement of disabled children in private schools at taxpayer expense is not unprecedented.

In one highly publicized case, a dyslexic New Hampshire woman named Karen Morse sued her school district because she graduated from high school in 1984 without being able to read. Morse, who was senior class president, editor of the school newspaper and a member of the National Honor Society, said she relied on her wit and the help of friends to hide her disability.

School officials, who did not determine that she was dyslexic until her junior year, agreed to pay her tuition at the Landmark School in 1985. But when Landmark officials recommended that she stay a second year, the district balked. Morse sued and, in 1986, the district was ordered to pay another $27,000 in tuition and legal fees.

In California, about 5,000 of the 412,000 disabled students in special-education programs are so handicapped that they require private care. The cost to the state last year was almost $61 million.

In the Ventura Unified School District, about a dozen of 1,350 disabled children receive some form of private care, according to district officials. After subsidies from the state, the cost to the district last year was just $329.

Severe Disabilities

Most private placements, however, are reserved for only the most disabled children, usually those who are severely emotionally disturbed, mentally retarded or physically handicapped to the point where learning in a regular classroom is impossible, state officials say.

Of about 229,000 California students that have been determined to be learning disabled, which often indicates a form of dyslexia, only 796 received private care last year, officials said.

“Learning disabled--those are the kinds of kids the public schools are geared up for,” said Clyde Chantry, a consultant in the special-education compliance unit at the Department of Education. “They’re considered the easy ones to handle.”

Indeed, advocates for dyslexics in Ventura County said classes for the learning disabled here are generally good, but that parents seeking additional help are usually thwarted by a complicated, burdensome procedure that can span several years.

“I talk with parents who are distraught to the point of tears because they cannot get the proper help for their children,” said Mary Taylor-Parr, president and founder of Genesis, a Ventura County support group for dyslexic adults and parents of dyslexic children.

“If they knew the school district would help pay for private care, there would be a line out there of parents trying to get their children into Landmark,” she said.

Expertise and Money

Others say that even parents who know such care is available often don’t have the legal expertise, time or money to demand action.

For instance, Judith Duke, a single parent in Ventura, said she has struggled for two years to find an adequate program for her 6-year-old son, who is hyperactive, has problems with his hearing and motor skills, and might be dyslexic.

So far, Duke said, her son has been placed in four schools within the district and has been assessed by the special-education staff on three occasions. Nevertheless, she said she sees him “falling through the cracks” because she cannot persuade the district to tailor a program to his disabilities.

“They smile sweetly and pat me on the back, but they’re not giving my kid the services that he needs,” Duke said. “Maybe this other family pushed because they had the money and the time. But I’m a single parent on Medi-Cal and AFDC. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

Jeffrey Barsch, a learning-disability specialist at Ventura College who assisted the Kleimans in their request for private placement, agreed that most parents are poorly informed about their rights and are often intimidated about asserting them.

Articulate Plea

But he said the Kleimans committed no offense by making what he called an intelligent and articulate plea on their daughter’s behalf.

“There’s nothing to this, except that they knew how to stand up for themselves,” Barsch said. “I don’t think they got any privilege that others couldn’t get if they were verbally sophisticated enough to make a point.”

The Kleimans wrote to the Ventura Unified School District in October, 1987, requesting the placement of their daughter in Landmark for the 1988-89 school year, according to documents filed by the district in Ventura County Superior Court in April, 1988. The district was seeking the right to have an attorney present at a subsequent hearing with the Kleimans.

Landmark, in Prides Crossing, Mass., is home to 400 students, ranging in age from 9 to 20, about 45% of whom receive public funds to attend. Founded in 1971 by Charles Drake, a Harvard-trained educator and himself a dyslexic, the school requires only that students be of at least average intelligence and exhibit no severe emotional problems.

Day Classes

Landmark West, in Culver City, has about 175 students who attend day classes but do not live on campus. Experts say there are few schools in Southern California that provide the same quality of education for dyslexics as the Landmark schools.

The Kleimans’ daughter had been enrolled in the Ventura Unified School District prior to the 1986-87 school year, but at the time was attending Ojai Valley School, a private school that offers no special-education programs, court records say.

Riccardo W. Nargie, the district’s special-education director, told the Kleimans that his staff would have to conduct a series of tests to measure the girl’s disability and determine whether Landmark was an appropriate placement.

But in a Nov. 4, 1987, memo included in the court records, Nargie recalled a telephone conversation in which Melodie Kleiman objected to that procedure.

She complained that “just because she was a lawyer was no reason the district needed to give her daughter 300 tests” and that “because she was a lawyer there was no reason the district should cross every ‘t’ and dot every ‘i,’ ” Nargie wrote.

Third-Party Testing

In a letter to state officials the next month, also filed in the courts, Melodie Kleiman indicated that she wanted all testing done by a neutral third party and that she wanted the list of tests requested by the district to “be examined in detail and shortened to a list of tests that are reasonably required under the circumstances of my daughter’s particular case.”

At an administrative hearing in February, 1988, the two sides agreed to drop several of the tests, allowed the remaining examinations to be done by independent physicians and stipulated that the district observe the girl for only an hour in her Ojai classroom, according to court records.

Sources familiar with the results told The Times that they believed the tests reflected only mild problems. “She had average ability and was doing a little below average work,” one source said.

Another added: “There was some question whether she would have even qualified for special education within the district.”

Team of Experts

Under state law, the case should have been referred to an assessment team of special-education experts who would have then developed an “individualized education plan,” or IEP, indicating the extent of the girl’s disability and recommending an appropriate placement.

Although the assessment team was convened, according to sources, its members never had a chance to offer their opinions. Caldarelli had turned the matter over to the independent panel, which concluded that the girl should go to Landmark.

“We have this process set up and they circumvented it,” one source said. “How a family can just jump over all those steps is what is so baffling to everybody.”

But Caldarelli defended the process, saying an independent panel was the only way to defuse nearly a year of accumulated hostilities. “This case had not been handled well,” he said. “It needed to be moved into a forum for fair, objective evaluations and recommendations.”

The five-member school board was somewhat less enthusiastic. In a Nov. 14, 1988, meeting, board members approved the arrangement as “merely the settlement of a disputed claim” and stipulated that they were not making “an admission of appropriate placement,” according to minutes of the meeting.

Faced with the prospect of a lawsuit from the Kleimans, some school board members felt that the settlement was their only practical alternative.

“We anticipated we were going to wind up in litigation and we wanted to find a procedure that would produce an acceptable solution to both parties,” said board member Terry Kilbride. “I’m not sure that I’d go so strong as to say I feel good about it. But it was not inappropriate.”