Concerns about potential bullying are not enough to prove that a proposed school placement is inappropriate for a student with special needs under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, a federal judge has ruled.
In a Pennsylvania case pitting the parents of a teen with autism, known in court papers as J.E., against their school district, the parents argued that the district should pay for a private placement as opposed to the large public high school the officials recommended.
Fear that J.E. would be bullied at the public school was among the reasons cited by the parents in arguing that the district proposal was inappropriate. Specifically, J.E.’s mom said that she heard students at the school talking about bullying and the parents said J.E. had been subject to bullying at a previous school.
However, in a decision reached earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Eduardo C. Robreno said that worries about bullying are insufficient to deem a placement inappropriate.
“J.E. may face bullying, but a fair appropriate public education does not require that the district be able to prove that a student will not face future bullying at a placement, as this is impossible,” Robreno wrote in his opinion.
Your child could be subject to bullying at a private school, too. My advice is to help your child how to react when bullied. Private school bullying can be just as bad, if not worse!!! I went to public school through elementary and junior high. I was bullied there. When I went to private high school, I was also bullied. People love to bully kids who are different in some way!!! My son is bullied in high school, but he has a plan in place to help him handle it.
I went to public school and then private school for high school years. In public school they will LET the bullies get away with it. They did in my case. Private school is more prone to confront the bullying and make it less likely to happen. Yes I was bullied in private school but not near as bad as public school. The bullies in public school made it so bad for me I wound up in an ALTERNATIVE school because I would try to stand up for my self and did not know the correct way to go about it. An alternative school is the LAST place an autistic person should be in for sure. I was a white female in an all black male classroom in the alternative school I was in back in 1985.
To “musiclady” — What kind of plan does your son have for bullying? Does he tell the school counselor or a teacher, or deal with it himself?
My local catholic school has students and parents sign an anti-bullying pledge each year that specifically lists the things that are considered bullying. If you remove the religious statement at the beginning, there is nothing about this pledge that would conflict with the public school’s code of conduct. Why don’t public schools do this?
And yet adults have the right to a safe hostility-free and harassment-free work place. It would be interesting to know the history of U.S. District Court Judge Eduardo C. Robreno. A local judge who found a teacher not guilty of physically assaulting a special needs third grader turned out to have a record of leniency against child abusers. He even praised the woman for her dedication to her profession. Amazingly, he previously gave a woman charged with murder of her own 4 year old child (by stuffing her mouth with a rag for crying) only probation.