Attorney: Family In Andover Special Ed Decision Was 'Test Case'

ANDOVER, MA -- Andover Public Schools never offered a settlement to the family that won a special needs case against the town earlier this month and used the family as a "test case" to see if it could win similar hearings, according to an attorney that represented the family. Earlier this month the Massachusetts Division of Administrative Law Appeals and the Bureau of Special Education ruled in favor of the family and ordered Andover Public Schools to pay for attorney fees and for costs incurred to send the nine-year-old child to the Landmark School in Beverly.

"[They family has] been through so much and only ever wanted to make sure their bright, hard-working son could learn to read," Lillian E. Wong, a special education attorney that represented the family, said in a message that was shared on a closed Facebook group for Andover residents. "Despite the emotional and financial toll (they are certainly not wealthy) this took on them, they were model parents. They were always respectful, kind, and professional even as their son and their son's needs were used [to set] some sort of example for the entire town."

The boy's family had argued the school district could not adequately address their son's dyslexia and that the school system should reimburse them for costs to send him to the Landmark School in Beverly. 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."

In a March, 2016 finance committee meeting, Superintedent Sheldon Berman had said he planned against parents who pushed special education cases like the one in question and "shut them down." The hearings are involved, and parents usually have to pay for outside testing of their child to build their case, which ads to the cost.

The hearing was held in May and the decision was issued on July 9. Such hearings are relatively rare; 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.

"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," Sara Berman, the hearing officer, 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."

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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).