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MAY 2007

Guest Editorial:
Giving Parents Help, Not the Run Around

By Betsy Gotbaum

The City is failing to provide basic information to parents of special education students—even ignoring phone calls asking for help.

That’s what a report my office released last month concluded. The report, Waiting for Help, found that both Committees on Special Education (CSE), the Department of Education (DOE) entities responsible for processing special education cases, and parent coordinators failed to respond to more than half of nearly 400 requests for assistance by Public Advocate investigators. Response rates were especially low for non-English inquiries.

Stories of an unresponsive DOE are nothing new—especially to parents of children with disabilities.

Just four years ago, as part of its reform of the City’s special education system, the DOE consolidated the number of administrative bodies responsible for processing special education cases from thirty-seven committees to just ten. The consolidated CSEs were redesigned to correspond with the city’s ten instructional regions. The changes were supposed to help parents of special education students.

In reality, they did more harm them good.  Most notably, my office documented a dramatic decrease in the number of evaluations and re-evaluations processed by the newly consolidated CSEs.

After receiving complaints from parents and advocates regarding the responsiveness of the CSEs, my office started making calls to CSEs, posing as parents who needed information about special education services. We found that calls placed to Committees went unreturned; reaching an appropriate CSE staff member was next to impossible; investigators were often unable to leave messages for CSE staff because voicemail systems were full; and contact information was often wrong or out-of-date.

My office exists to help New Yorkers—especially when they are having trouble accessing City services. To help parents of children with disabilities get answers to their questions, I have called on the Department of Education to implement a series of reforms:

1) Improve the Responsiveness of New York City’s Committees on Special Education: The DOE needs a new policy to ensure that the committees return parents’ phone calls within five business days and that live operators answer phones during regular business hours.

2) Improve the Accessibility of New York City’s Committees on Special Education:In many cases, phone numbers on the website were wrong.  The DOE needs to ensure that all CSE phone numbers are working properly and that CSE employees have working voicemail boxes that are checked frequently.

3) Improve the Accessibility of the Committees on Special Education to Non-English-Speakers: If you’re a parent, you deserve to get answers to your questions – regardless of whether those questions are in English, Spanish, or any other language. To provide this service, the DOE needs to contract with a telephone-based translation service to ensure that all Committees can communicate with non-English-speaking parents.

When their children are having problems at school, parents want help, not the run-around.  y not returning phone calls, the City is failing parents. These common-sense reforms will help the DOE help parents and students instead of leaving families in the dark.

If you are parent of a child with special needs and you’re having difficulty obtaining information or services from the DOE, please call my office at 212.669.7250.#

Betsy Gotbaum is the Public Advocate for New York City.

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