Disabled Girl’s Parents Win School Case

In a victory for the parents of children with disabilities, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that public schools must pay the cost of private schooling for a learning-impaired child who was not offered adequate help in the public system.

The court’s opinion makes clear that public schools can be forced to pay a heavy penalty if they default on their duty to offer these parents a good learning program for their child.

On a 9-0 vote, the justices sided with the disgruntled parents of a South Carolina girl who, against the advice of public officials, enrolled her in a special private school.

School officials said that they should not have to reimburse the parents for the $12,000-a-year cost--more than four times what they spend on regular students--because the parents had unilaterally withdrawn their daughter and had placed her in an unapproved private facility.

But the high court disagreed. Citing the federal Individuals with Disabilities Act, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that the public schools must give all disabled children a “free appropriate public education.”

If they fail to offer an adequate program of special education for such children, they must reimburse parents who decide to go elsewhere, O’Connor said.

The decision goes further than previous rulings in giving the parents the power to ignore the wishes of public officials and still seek public reimbursement for private schooling.

Earlier rulings made clear that public schools could be forced to pay private schooling costs, but Tuesday’s decision also says that they must pay for a private program that does not have state approval.

But O’Connor also noted that parents act “at their own financial risk” when they unilaterally enroll their child in a private school.

In this case (Florence County vs. Carter, 91-1528), the parents were entitled to reimbursement only because a federal judge had concluded that the public school’s proposed special program was “wholly inadequate” and that the private school provided a first-rate program.

Nonetheless, the court’s ruling likely will prove costly to public school boards, which have been reeling under growing costs for special education.

“This is one more step down the road toward what is becoming a financial disaster,” said Gwendolyn Gregory, deputy counsel for the National School Boards Assn. “When you are talking about learning-disabled children, they are the fastest growing category” of children needing special education. “The parents want private programs, and they want the taxpayers to pay for it,” she said.

In the most recent figures available, the school boards group said that the nation’s public schools are paying more than $18 billion a year for special education, only $1.5 billion of which is reimbursed by the federal government.

In 1975, when Congress passed the first law requiring “free, appropriate public education” for all disabled and learning-impaired children, it promised to pay 40% of the extra cost.

Despite the funding shortfall, Congress has refused to ease the mandate on the public schools and the high court has vigorously enforced the law as it was written.

This case arose in the early 1980s when the parents of Shannon Carter realized that their daughter was not learning to read. School officials initially blamed her troubles on the girl’s lack of effort. But by the time she entered ninth grade, they agreed that Shannon had a severe learning disability.

Still, they recommended only three periods of extra instruction each week and promised only that the girl would read at the fifth-grade level by the time she finished high school. Dissatisfied with this offer, the Carters enrolled Shannon in the Trident Academy, a private boarding school for the learning disabled, and she graduated with her class in 1988.

The parents then filed suit seeking $36,000 in reimbursement. A federal judge agreed that Trident had offered Shannon an “excellent education,” in stark contrast to the public program in Florence County, S.C. A U.S. appeals court in Richmond, Va., affirmed that decision.

Earlier this year, when the justices agreed to hear the school board’s appeal, public education officials hoped that the court would use the case to reign in the soaring cost of special education.

Instead, during oral arguments last month, the justices homed in on the fact that the school board had “defaulted” on its responsibility under federal law.

“There is no doubt that Congress has imposed a significant financial burden on states and school districts,” O’Connor wrote for the court. “Yet public school authorities who want to avoid reimbursing parents for the private education of a disabled child can do one of two things: Give the child a free appropriate public education in a public setting, or place the child in an appropriate private setting of the state’s choice.”