From what I can tell, the answer is “no”. In our case, LuLu has been unserved by our local public school for 18 months now. During those 18 months we’ve had 13 days in court and 4 IEP meetings, but no education provided for LuLu. Meanwhile, she’s been at home with me, in Ladybug Elementary, doing our thing.

When a due process complaint is filed (either by the school district or more often by the parents) a rule called “stay put” is generally evoked. Stay put means that the child’s placement and services remain the same as was outlined in the last IEP, not the one currently in question due to the complaint. So, in February 2006 we evoked “stay put”, but we opted not to use it. Why?

Well, LuLu was being repeatedly suspended for explosive behaviors and her anxiety level was sky high. She was literally pulling the skin of her fingers and bottoms of her feet. She wasn’t sleeping and was nearly incoherent from the anxiety. The teachers and administrators working with her had lost all patience and cried loudly in the Feb 2006 meeting that they had “done all they could do”. When I consulted our psychiatrist about LuLu’s increase anxiety she was adamant that sending her back into that situation would mean a need to hospitalize her if her self-injurious behaviors continued. So, she recommended hospital homebound status, which the school district refused.

I have found out months later (when LuLu felt it was safe to tell) that she was clear that she was going to this “kiddie prison” school, because she had been told repeatedly by staff at her old school that if she didn’t behave, they would have no choice but to send her there. She had also known other children who were sent there because they were “bad”. While I had tried to shield her from any discussion about this psycho-ed center, or even knowledge that Super Dad and I were touring the place, apparently she already knew. (Hypervigilant kids have a keen sense of what’s going on!) I suspected this at the time, because of her incredible meltdowns and anxiety attacks, but I didn’t realize how clearly she believed that being sent to this school was a punishment for her “bad” behavior.

I’m sure the school personnel will never admit to any of that. And at this point, they don’t need to. The point is that there was absolutely NOTHING therapeutic about that school (despite claims otherwise) if the way you present sending a child there to the child is either “straighten up your behavior or we’re sending you to kiddie prison”…PLEEZ! What if their disabilities prevent them from “straightening up?” What if that message only serves to escalate their anxiety and make it harder for them to self-regulate? If it was so therapeutic, wouldn’t it be offered as an opportunity for healing, not as a punishment?

Ok, back to the topic…if parents decide to move a child to a new school, due process complaint situations often do change, but they don’t HAVE to. Sometimes the cases are settled, sometimes they are revised. If parents enroll their child in a private school, the case might change in that the parents could start seeking reimbursement for their child’s tuition.

In our case, private school was not financially an option. Even if we had decided to seek reimbursement for tuition, the battle was obviously going to drag on, and the school district has mountains more of the taxpayers’ money to fight this battle than we do. I’m truly not a gambler at heart, and I just didn’t like the odds of that one. We were backed into a corner on the original due process complaint, and it seems logical to me to fight a battle of not sending LuLu to a place where she can be further traumatized. But to take the financial risk of going into deep debt for a private school…well, that’s another story. The kind of one-on-one setting she needs is just downright expensive.

So by enrolling LuLu in a virtual public school, basically nothing is changing in our due process situation. We’re currently in federal appeal and awaiting movement from the federal judge at this point. The fact that I’ve researched and enrolled my child elsewhere doesn’t impact that at all. It does, though, move any future IEP meetings to the new IEP team at the Georgia Virtual Academy. And what that means for us remains to be seen. (How is that for cautious optimism?)

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