Andover Schools Ordered To Reimburse Special Needs Student

ANDOVER, MA -- Andover Public Schools was ordered to reimburse the parents of a nine-year-old student with dyslexia for costs incurred to send the child to the Landmark School in Beverly. The Massachusetts Division of Administrative Law Appeals and the Bureau of Special Education issued the ruling on July 9. The school system had maintained that it was able to provide adequate services to the child.

"Ultimately, while Andover has committed an impressive amount of resources to developing and improving its district-wide language-based program at the Bancroft School, that program is not fully appropriate for Student at this time. Student had the benefit of skilled and devoted in-class and pull-out support in Kindergarten and first grade, but his progress was such that the Team agreed he needed more intensive programming," Hearing Officer Sara Berman wrote in her ruling. "Despite the higher level of resources (such as Landmark Outreach) available to the Bancroft program, service delivery is not sufficiently integrated across content areas and is not cohesive enough to meet Student’s needs."

It was the first time Andover Public School had gone to a special needs hearing since 2011. In 2016, there were 167,530 individual education plans in the state, and just 668 hearing requests. Of those, 23 resulted in decisions like the one in the Andover case. Andover Public School currently has 504 individual education plans, which are developed on a case-by-case basis for students who need additional support or learning accommodations.

The school system will also have to pay any legal and testing fees the parents incurred in taking their son's case to hearing.

"Student’s placement at Landmark was and is appropriate for Student for the time periods at issue in this hearing. There is no dispute that Landmark is an approved, well-established school that specializes in educating children with language-based learning disabilities," Berman wrote. "Finally, I note that Andover’s program could be appropriate for Student in the near future if either (1) Andover expands the self-contained portion of the language-based classroom to encompass all of the other core subjects, or (2) Student makes sufficient progress with basic reading and writing skills to benefit from the inclusion portion of the program without losing necessary remediation time."

Read the full decision.

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Dave Copeland can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).