Judge’s OK Opens Door to Overhaul of Special Education

Clearing the way for a massive overhaul of the special education system in the Los Angeles Unified School District, a federal judge on Monday approved the negotiated settlement of a class-action lawsuit.

“I will sign this decree today . . . so that youngsters who need our attention and love will get that as quickly as possible,” said Senior U.S. District Judge Laughlin Waters at the end of a 2 1/2-hour hearing Monday morning.

Waters cautioned attorneys for the district and the disabled--represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and a private firm--that he was concerned about complaints by some parents and advocacy groups that the consent decree does not offer enough opportunities for future objections. He said he would be reviewing all future amendments to the agreement with an eye toward such concerns.

“Hopefully we’ve made our point,” said attorney Peter Schey of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, who filed the most extensive of six objections to the settlement. “We’ll be watching very carefully.”

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Attorneys for the district and the ACLU both described the ruling as “thrilling.”

“Now we take Step 1,” said the ACLU’s Mark Rosenbaum, referring to the five-year reform process the settlement promises.

As part of the agreement, the district, which serves 65,000 disabled children, acknowledged that it had violated those students’ rights and broke federal and state laws governing their education.

Monday’s settlement approval begins a five-year process of change that is to be led by two independent consultants--a former state bureaucrat and a Pennsylvania academic who have spent the past two years detailing the district’s errors and whose thick report formed the settlement’s core.

The consultants emphasized that Los Angeles Unified has too many disabled children in segregated settings, such as separate schools and classrooms.

The process of integrating students and improving their access to everything from education to physical therapy is to begin with the creation of a community review panel, a timeline for change and a preliminary budget during the next three months. A new assistant superintendent’s position will be created with sole responsibility for special education.

The district was moved to settle the suit, in part, by the cautionary example of New York City’s school system, which fought a similar lawsuit in court 17 years ago and remains entangled in a drawn-out legal battle.

In Los Angeles, the suit grew out of the frustrations of one mother, whose daughter failed 10th grade twice despite the mother’s pleas for tutorial help for the girl’s learning disability. The suit, filed in November 1993, carries that student’s name--Chanda Smith--but was later expanded to include all disabled students in the district.

It is that expansion that most worries parents of children with more severe disabilities--mental retardation, for instance, and physical problems--because they feel their concerns were not adequately addressed in the process. At a series of confrontational public hearings earlier this year, hundreds of parents protested the drafting of a consent decree with very little public input.

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Schey, whose daughter attends public school in a wheelchair, pointed out that the consent decree does not mention improving physical access to schools.

“There’s not a single word about architectural barriers,” Schey said. “When will children have access to bathrooms? When will children have access to field trips?”

Schey said such vagueness makes it particularly unfair to ask parents to give up their right to file other class-action suits--as the settlement requires--or to preclude them from complaining to Waters without first going through a lengthy grievance process in the district.

But Waters sided with the settlement attorneys, saying that the decree is purposefully vague because details are to be worked out in the coming years.

“This decree should not contain a great deal of architectural details,” he said. “It is a foundation on which to build.”