Testing Accommodations for SAT and Other College Board Exams Just Got Easier

As of January 1st, the vast majority of high school students who have testing accommodations on their IEP or as part of a 504 plan will automatically be approved for identical accommodations when writing College Board exams like the SAT, PSAT, SAT subject tests, and AP exams. Private school students with disabilities who don’t have an IEP or 504 plan will receive identical testing accommodations to their formal school-based plans.

According to the College Board:

Under this new policy, school testing accommodation coordinators need to answer only two questions when submitting most requests for students: “Is the requested accommodation(s) in the student’s plan?” and “Has the student used the accommodation(s) for school testing?” If the answer is yes to both questions, eligible students can be approved to receive most accommodations on College Board exams. This new process is expected to reduce the approval time for an overwhelming majority of accommodation requests.

The College Board is also introducing new assistive technologies to meet a variety of testing accommodation needs. A digital test, delivered on a flash drive, is now available for screen readers and other assistive technology devices. An MP3 test (replacing the cassette test form) allows students who need to listen to a test to do so. And a four-function calculator can now be provided to students who need one on the Math Test sections that otherwise don’t permit use of a calculator.

These changes came after the Justice Department began investigating the College Board for civil rights violations last year. More and more states had adopted the SAT or ACT as a required test for high school students and the Civil Rights Division had seen a sharp uptick in complaints about the slow, laborious process for documenting a student’s disability and approving the testing accommodations needed. 

Please note that the College Board’s SSD portal has not been updated to reflect these changes. For more information, please see the College Board’s webpage on this topic.

City Councilmembers Tell Mayor to Honor His Commitments to Special Education Families

Our advocacy is having an impact!

Last fall, we reported to you again and again and again about our efforts to make sure that outstanding tuition reimbursement payments, promised in writing by the city, were paid to our clients. Some of you called into radio shows. Others wrote to their elected officials. And, as your attorneys, we called and sent weekly memos to the Department of Education, regularly reminding them about the status of outstanding stipulations from 2015-16.

Frustrated by the serious delays impacting our clients, in December we reached out to City Council Education Committee Chair Daniel Dromm and two longtime friends of special education families, Councilmembers Ben Kallos and Daniel Garodnick from Manhattan. We asked them to co-author a letter to the Mayor asking him to honor the commitments he made in his 2014 Special Education Initiative, in which he promised to reduce the burden on families of special education students by, among other things, expediting tuition reimbursements when the city decides to settle a case with a parent.

We are thrilled to report that Councilmembers Dromm, Kallos, and Garodnick sent a strongly worded letter to Mayor De Blasio on Friday, asking him to honor the commitments his administration has made to special needs families. We are very grateful to our elected officials for taking this action on behalf of our client families.

Comment on New York City’s K-5 and 6-12 Draft School Discipline Plans until January 30th

Even though the use of school suspensions in New York City public schools has declined, the disparity in their use with disabled students has not.

2015-16 Student Safety Act data shows that while students with disabilities comprise 18.7% of NYC’s public school population, they were disproportionately punished with 38.6% of suspensions, slightly up from 38.2% the previous year.

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union’s factsheet, “The School to Prison Pipeline,” a child who is suspended from school is much more likely to “fall behind in school, be retained a grade, drop out of high school, commit a crime, and become incarcerated as an adult.” NYCLU adds that “[t]he best demographic indicators of children who will be suspended are not the type or severity of the crime, but the color of their skin, their special education status, the school they go to, and whether they have been suspended before.”

Police in schools are also arresting and handcuffing kids in situations unrelated to the commission of a crime—25% of these interventions are the result of a student in emotional distress. The DOE’s draft plans contain no guidance or rules for how police officers interact with children in schools. 

In both its mission statement accompanying the proposed discipline plan for K-5 and in its proposed discipline plans for 6-12, the DOE says it aims to “reduce the use of suspensions as a disciplinary tool and will eliminate the use of summonses and arrests for minor school misbehavior while continuing to advance school safety.”

While hailing some of the reforms as steps in the right direction, many advocates are not convinced that the changes go far enough. As reported in Chalkbeat, while the DOE initially promised to eliminate suspensions for K-2 students last July, their written proposal stops short of that, allowing the district to suspend some of its youngest students in situations in which “a student repeatedly displays behavior that is violent or could cause serious harm, or a student violates the Gun-Free Schools Act.” The city’s public schools suspended 801 children in K-2 last year, according to School Safety Act data.

The Urban Youth Collaborative have also criticized the plan for not doing more to address disparities in discipline for students of color and students with disabilities, telling Chalkbeat, “The incremental change is important, but it’s been incremental change for a decade.” They point out that an offense like “insubordination,” for which suspension would still be an allowable punishment under the proposed plan, is highly subjective and susceptible to biased enforcement. 

Parents who are interested in sharing their thoughts on school discipline policy with the New York City Department of Education have until January 30th to email their comments to lherrer@schools.nyc.gov.  A public hearing on the draft revisions will be held on Wednesday, January 25th from 6-8pm at MS 131, 100 Hester Street in Manhattan in the school’s auditorium.

All documents related to these proposals can be found on the DOE’s Discipline Code page of its website.

DOE Considering Multi-Year Settlement Agreements

Earlier this week, the NYC DOE’s Office of General Counsel advised our office that some parents will have the option of entering into a three-year renewable settlement agreement with the NYC DOE. As many of you may recall, Mayor de Blasio’s 2014 Special Education Initiative that started the “Fast Track” settlement process also included the prospect of multi-year settlements.

But don’t get too excited yet. Thus far, the proposal from the DOE is not favorable to parents. In fact, the current proposed language significantly weakens a parent’s position in settlement. The DOE does not appear to be committing to paying out for years two and three at the time of the agreement, rather, they’re setting a cap on the amount they’ll reimburse for years two and three if the IEP remains the same and if the DOE has reason to settle the case.

In other words, the language of the proposed agreement forces parents to commit to a maximum dollar amount in reimbursement, but relieves the District of its responsibility to pay if certain conditions are not met. Additionally, because parents remain obligated to file Ten Day Notices each year, a multi-year settlement under the DOE’s current proposal requires that parents continue to be in an adversarial position with the DOE.

We will continue to communicate with the Office of General Counsel to determine whether equitable multi-year settlements are a possibility. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Equality in Schools

“To all men of good will, this decision came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of human captivity. It came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of colored people throughout the world who had had a dim vision of the promised land of freedom and justice… this decision came as a legal and sociological deathblow to an evil that had occupied the throne of American life for several decades.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking in 1956 at an annual luncheon of the National Committee for Rural Schools, reflecting on the importance of Brown v. Board of Education

By Regina Skyer

The laws that govern special education in our country are inextricably linked to the Civil Rights Movement. It is befitting that on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day we acknowledge this link and express our gratitude for the impact that the civil rights movement continues to have in advancing the rights of children with disabilities in our school system.

Maybe you have heard the phrase, “Equal justice under law”? It is inscribed over the doors of the U.S. Supreme Court and comes from the Equal Protection Clause. It was enacted in 1868 as an effort to validate the equality provisions of the Civil Rights Act, the legislative culmination of the end of the Civil War and by extension, of slavery.

It was this idea, of equal justice under law, which served as the basis for the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v Board of Education, which, in rejecting the “separate but equal” doctrine that had upheld racial segregation in our nation’s schools, heralded the binding principle that in education separate is not equal.

The spark of excitement that the legal victory in Brown inspired could have turned to disillusionment when many school districts made it clear they had no intention of following the Court’s ruling. Instead, that spark caught fire and civil rights leaders like Dr. King made school desegregation a cornerstone demand of the new civil rights movement. 

In the ruling for Brown, the Court wrote, “In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.” It is easy to see how this declaration, the principle of “separate is not equal,” and the front-page example of the hope, spirit, and struggle of this historic social movement taking on institutional racism, inspired parents and attorneys of disabled children. It was only after the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown that suing school districts for excluding or segregating children with disabilities was undertaken as a legal strategy.

Brown and the civil rights movement’s battle for desegregation paved the way for the law we know as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), upon which all rights for special education students are based. On this day that we remember Dr. King, let us not forget this enduring contribution.