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8 The Eanes school district reached a legal settlement on Oct. 5 with the parents of a student qualifying for special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
The school district agreed to pay the student, who was not identified in public records, $70,000 during the November 2009 – August 2010 time period and reimbursement of $4,000 attorney fees. In exchange for the cash payment, the student, who is not currently enrolled in an Eanes school, has given up the right to educational services from the district, including special education services, evaluation and private school tuition reimbursement.
Rebecca Ryan, the attorney representing the student, said that pressure on public school districts throughout the country is increasing because of rising numbers of students in need of special services.
“There is an ever-increasing population of children that qualify for special services,” she said. “The incidence of autism alone has increased from 1 in 150 children to a more recent estimate of 1 in 91 children.”
Ryan, who specializes in special education law and represents students and their parents, said that public schools are currently under-funded, under-served, under-trained and unable to handle the number of children coming into the system requiring special education services.
“What I am hearing from schools is that they just don’t have the staff needed to address special education,” she said.
The $70,000 settlement will paid in three installments of $23,333 on Dec. 15, May 15 and Aug. 15. The district denied all liability in the settlement agreement for incidents, events actions and omissions asserted by the student’s family.
“It was determined to be in the best interest of the district to resolve the issue in order to avoid costs associated with potential litigation,” said Bernadette Gonzalez, in-house attorney for the Eanes school district.
The house of cards is falling down.
How much did our district pay outside legal counsel prior to settling this case? I bet the number is in the thousands and wish the Picayune had included that very important information in this article.
No doubt the district didn’t want the details of this case aired in the public. The Eanes ISD leadership approved $74,000 (of our tax dollars) to protect the district, not the child at issue. Picayune, we challenge you to gather the legal invoices associated with this case (before it settled) and publish them along with the settlement agreement (redacted to protect the child’s identity) so that we as a community can take a look behind the Eanes ISD curtain. Yet another child harmed and then forced out of Eanes ISD.
Oh, I guess that makes sense. So the district should have a full time law firm on staff to handle this?
Great–the district has like five law firms on monthly retainer. Maybe that’s a contributing factor to all the lawsuits they’re finding themselves in.
Which then creates a snow ball of law firms?
I think it’s more like an infestation of law firms.
EISD choses to be one of the most litigious districts in the state as a management tactic. In this instance EISD chose to pay lawyers rather than to provide educational services to a child with special needs. And it worked! EISD paid the parents $70,000 (plus legal fees, of course) but won by forcing the kid out of the public schools. Don’t you wish it was your child who was being forced out by an “Exemplary” district? But this is just one example: there are so many uses for lawyers around EISD. For example, they are currently fighting an ADA lawsuit when any one who visits our campuses can easily see EISD is significantly out of compliance with ADA. Why? Because they’ve fought ADA since 1992, and so far it is working for them. ADA improvements ignored enable EISD to astroturf practice fields while children with disabilities wait at unopened doors. (http://westlakepicayune.com/2009/05/13/lawsuit-filed-against-eisd-stems-from-ada-violations/) EISD hired lawyers to help them deny parents of children with special needs the right to visit special ed classrooms. Of course there was no legal reason, but hiring the lawfirm did enable them to keep parents out of classrooms for almost a year. (http://westlakepicayune.com/2009/09/17/eisd-limits-on-parent-visits-sparks-debate/) And these are just three things that happened in the last 12 months! Why does a public school need 5 lawfirms on retainer? At least part of the answer is obvious: to avoid costly responsibilities it would otherwise need to acknowledge.