Judge Rejects District Challenge to Special Ed Panels

A federal judge Monday flatly rejected an effort by Los Angeles school administrators to dismantle a court-ordered process for improving services to students with disabilities.

The ruling forces the Los Angeles Unified School District to resume working with committees, including parents and experts, that are writing 20 plans covering various aspects of special education, from identification of students to transportation.

Since spring, district officials had been backing away from the committee process. The confrontation heated up when the Board of Education rejected the last four of 16 plans written by the committees.

Last month, the district filed court papers arguing that the committee apparatus was getting in the way of new initiatives to improve special education.

The district’s lawyers asked to replace the committees and their plans with a more flexible management system and to dismiss two court-appointed administrators who had overseen the process.

In their place, the district requested a special master to set goals for compliance with federal and state laws and hold the district management to specific benchmarks.

In his written ruling Monday, Judge Ronald S.W. Lew denied the district’s request and overruled the board’s rejection of the committees’ four plans, declaring them adopted. Lew said the district failed to show that the administrators had not performed their duties.

Attorneys who filed the 8-year-old case praised the ruling as a victory for the district’s 83,000 special education students. District officials said they think it will hurt those students.

“Our disappointment is that we had a better way to go,” said Supt. Roy Romer.

“We could have served the children better and we could have had our resources serve more of them.”

During a brief hearing before releasing the ruling, Lew gave the district a ray of hope by declaring that he found some problems with the structure of the Chanda Smith consent decree, named for the student whose family filed the initial complaint in 1993 alleging that the district denied her services required by law.

In particular, Lew said, he was concerned that the case has no end in sight. “What I fear most is that there will be a never-ending conclusion to this case,” Lew said. “That’s not right.”

Although Lew’s ruling did not expand on that thought, both parties interpreted it to mean that they should sit down and try to resolve their differences.

“We’ll listen to any legitimate concern the district has,” said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, among the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

The consent decree requires the school district to expand educational offerings to the system’s disabled students and move more of them into regular classes.

In agreeing to the decree in 1996, the school board concurred with a U.S. Department of Education investigation that found the district out of compliance with the federal 1973 Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.

Both parties agree that the district is still not in compliance.

District general counsel Harold J. Kwalwasser blamed the consent decree process, which he said had siphoned off hundreds of thousands of dollars and produced plans that tie the district’s hands by focusing on minutia.

In papers filed with the court, the ACLU and allied law firms countered that the district was unfairly blaming the consent decree for the district’s own failings.