Winkleman cases and Public Schools

[Guest guest]

Mara -Thanks for all of this information. Do you have contact information

for the OSEP committee that you named? When I go through the OSEP website,

I just can't seem to find it. It would be great to have their contact

information on hand.

Best Regards,

Sofia

- I do not have all the answers for your questions below but I do

have some places to start looking and information to share.

First off, the system is wholly unfair. When you call OSEP and speak to

anyone on the Texas monitoring team the first thi ng they will tell you is

that parents do have help - the federal government has set up a resource for

parents and in Texas they are small groups of highly dedicated individuals

like at the Pathproject. I do not want to criticize groups like the Path

project because they are doing all that they can with the limited resources

given, but they are not attorneys and can not attend ARDs and really can

only disperse information. Certainly not anything helpful against the large

law firms that school districts hire. I have repeatedly talked to Mr.

, Mr. Schneer and Mr. Corr - most of the Texas monitoring committee

about this issue. They have told lme that they are NOT hearing from parents

about the inequities in the system nor are they NOT hearing from parents

about the problems parents are facing in Texas. So first off,

we need to make our voices heard at the federal level. (After they refer you

to these offices they will then refer you to Advocacy, Inc. who suffers from

the similar problems - lack of staff and resources!!) I think a sustained

e-mail and fax blitz to everyone on the Texas monitoring team would have

some impact to atleast start focusing people on the situation here in Texas.

I personally do think this is a public trust issue as they are utilizing Tax

payer dollars to defend themselves in these cases and, therefore, should be

held accountable. Sometimes the money is legitimately spent as not every

case they defend against has merit, but we all know how broken the system is

and how unresponsive our districts are and, I would hazard to guess, that

more often than not the money is being used to stall or prevent school

districts from doing what they should be doing. There are several places in

the US that are exploring this issue - California and Long Island, NY. In

addition, several texas childrens advocacy groups are looking into this

issue as well. I would imagine that a FOI request can be made to get this

information. I think that is what Long Island parents did as well as the

newspaper Newsday. What is happening there and the exposure of corruption is

really illuminating.

I am not aware of any " Parent Union " unfortunately, the best we could

possibly come up with is try to encourage all our state law schools to

establish a disabilities law clinic... Syracuse has an effective one as does

the Univ. of Washington, we need something like that and I have called

around to every law school in Texas and no one has this!! Another way is to

try to get large law firms - much larger than the Walsh 's of the

world, I mean the National Law Firms with local offices here to start taking

cases pro bono. An enormous national law firm just won an award from a major

learning disabilities group for doing precisely this. Quite frankly, I do

not necessarily need nor am I optimistic that we would be able to establish

a viable " parents union " to make effective change, I think it would take a

few well publicized cases that are selected based on the facts that they

present to bring around some effective change.

JMO and hope that helps...

Mara