Special Needs Education

» Forestdweller - Not just bruises

Greg Cruey writes: "Is having some food rubbed in your face worth $700,000?"

This is Paige's mother, Ann. I feel the jury's award was actually very reasonable when one considers the enormous disruption to Paige's education that this abuse has caused and the cost of restoring Paige to where she would have been had the abuse not occurred. The problem was not simply that Paige was physically injured, horrible as that aspect of the case was. It was the way the district handled the situation. After the final assault (which followed several other complaints about this teacher,) we were unable to get any explanation whatsoever from the district or from the school board as to why or how Paige had been hurt. The teacher was temporarily returned to the classroom and then shipped off to another district (my understanding is that that district was not warned about the problem and had to discover it for themselves.)

Legally, the district is mandated to inform caregivers of any physical interventions and to document such interventions. This was not done and my many requests for an explanation, one of which was made to the school board, were simply ignored. Paige's own explanation was entirely consistent with the nature and location of her injuries. The first time we heard any of the district's various and often conflicting versions (which failed to explain the documented injuries) was after we had filed the suit! We had the three glaring red flags of child abuse -- a) no reporting, b) a changing explanation of the incident, and c) an explanation that was inconsistent with the injuries. Obviously we felt the school environment was unsafe and we simply could not return Paige to a school within the district until we understood what had happened to her and what was going to be done about it. We kept Paige home and she lost half a year of schooling as a result. Eventually, with the district still refusing to provide a legally mandated explanation of what had happened and with Paige terrified of returning to school, we were forced to place her in a private school for special needs children where we felt confident she would at least be physically safe.

Like many high-functioning children with Asperger's, Paige's intellectual (as measured by IQ tests) and social functioning have significantly improved with maturation. However, her *academic* funcioning has been completely thrown off course by the district's treatment of her. Paige entered the abusive classroom with standardized academic scores of above the 99th %ile and with an insatiable appetite for learning. Last summer, her IQ tested in the "profoundly gifted" range (> 99.99th %ile,) but her academic scores were way below where they should have been at around the 60th %ile. I will be dedicating the next five years of my life to trying to help Paige recover the academic competence and love of learning that her classroom experiences have cost her.

I should add that, in a post-trial settlement, we bargained away much of Paige's award in order to achieve closure. We felt we had exhausted our resources, financially and emotionally, in fighting the case and we simply could not continue with 2-3 years of appeals. Paige will receive a relatively modest sum when she turns 18, but she will receive no assistance from the district as she tries to negotiate the next six years. One of the ironies here is that school districts have almost unlimited access to public money with which to defend child abuse. The district would have had no trouble finding a lawyer who would accept payment to fight against Paige's interests in the appellate courts.

I have always been very strongly opposed to school vouchers, but now I have to reconsider this position. As a taxpayer, I contributed to paying both the teacher who hurt Paige and her enablers within the district administration, paying for their legal defense, and ultimately even paying the damages awarded against them (which are covered by the district's publically-funded insurance)! Additionally, we have learned that there were three complaints to CPS and two police reports against this teacher before she left the district. CPS has no jurisdiction over public school teachers and nobody else seemed particularly interested in maintaining student safety.

The specialist who tested Paige last summer described her as "so altruistic, so aesthetically sensitive, so brilliant, and so focused that she could become one of our great people." She felt that Paige was someone who could have been in college as a pre-teen. So much of Paige's development has been hijacked by this very dysfunctional situation and she's now years behind where she should be.

Difficult and traumatic as it was, I'd go through this whole experience again for the same result. It was time someone made a stand against institutionalized child abuse. The cost of losing a child, either literally (and what was done to Paige was potentially life-threatening) or in terms of trashing their potential, is just too high to ignore.

-- posted by Forestdweller