By Jennifer Smith Richards, The Columbus Dispatch, Tuesday January 27, 2015 2:28 pm.
Advocates for students with special needs filed a federal complaint today against six central Ohio school districts, Toledo schools and the Ohio Department of Education, saying they have failed to provide Spanish-speaking families translation and interpreter services
Public school districts are required by federal law to involve parents in the
special-education process in a language they understand. The absence of language
services can mean parents who don’t speak English might not know what
special-education help their children need and can’t advocate on their behalf.
Disability Rights Ohio, a federally designated advocate for people with
disabilities in Ohio, and Toledo-based Advocates for Basic Legal Equality say
the following districts have shut families out of the special-education process
and should be forced to make changes immediately: Columbus, Dublin, Groveport
Madison, South-Western, Toledo, Westerville and Whitehall.
The complaint was filed with the educational opportunities section of the
Office of Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Justice on behalf of 21
families who claim they are being discriminated against on the basis of
national origin. It asks the justice department to intervene and require the
districts to develop ways to identify which families need language assistance
and provide them. It also wants the department to order school staff to be
trained on their obligations to provide language services.
The state education department is named because, the complaint says, it doesn’t
offer Spanish-language assistance for families who want to file a
special-education complaint against their schools.
“What many school districts do pretty well is translate general documents that
go out on a regular basis. For these families, the problem is they’re not
getting documents that are critical to their children’s education translated.
They are more difficult to do because they’re individualized documents, they’re
not a form letter,” said Kristin Hildebrant, senior attorney at Disability
Rights Ohio.
“They can’t get the Department of Education to help them with their concerns
because they can’t communicate with them.”
The families’ names are masked in the complaint, but the complaint details
their struggles with each district. Most often, the families say that
everything from special-education meeting notices to students’ progress reports
and special-education plans are provided only in English, which they don’t
understand. When parents attend special-education meetings about their
children, no interpreter is provided.
In Toledo’s case, the complaint says the district fails to routinely send out
letters in Spanish or offer Spanish-language assistance for students without
disabilities, as well, said Mark Heller, senior attorney at ABLE.
“In Toledo, we had gone to the school district starting in 2011... and had a
series of meetings with the superintendent on this issue. The parents here
wanted to try to resolve this by dealing directly with the school system, but
nothing has improved even though we’ve received assurance that this would
change.
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