Word: luke
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...battle over who should pay how much to educate Luke Perkins is only the latest front in the war over funding for special education. It has been three decades since the Education for All Handicapped Children Act first guaranteed a free education tailored to meet the individual needs of students with disabilities. The goal of that law is honorable: to protect children whose disabilities for too long condemned them to low expectations. But the number of kids receiving special-ed services--for physical, cognitive, learning and other problems--has doubled since fiscal 1977, to an estimated 6.9 million (or roughly...
...surprisingly, the district balked. It argued that Luke, now 11, had been doing just fine at his local elementary school and that it shouldn't be held responsible for his backsliding at home. But both an independent hearing officer and an administrative-law judge disagreed and found that Luke's disability was severe enough to warrant a publicly financed 24-hour educational program. The district is now suing in federal court to try to overturn those rulings...
School districts stress that federal law does not require providing the best possible education for students like Luke. Rather, the law, which in 1990 was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, guarantees only a free "appropriate" education. "It doesn't say 'free minimal public education,' and it doesn't say 'free optimal public education,'" says Francisco Negrón, general counsel for the National School Boards Association. "It's somewhere in the middle...
...Perkins family's dispute--which has cost the district $191,000 in legal fees--school administrators say the parents are penalizing the district for Luke's behavior off campus. "The issues that they had were really surrounding home," says Karen Pielin, the district's special-ed director. Teachers from Berthoud went to the Perkinses' house to help get Luke on a schedule that would reinforce what he was learning at school. But Luke's father Jeff, a rheumatologist, said that even though they tried hard, the competing needs of their three other children made it impossible to keep Luke...
...Perkinses repeatedly asked to send Luke back to a district nearby where they felt the teachers were better equipped to handle autistic students. Julie Perkins says she begged Thompson's special-ed director to transfer her son. "I was in tears, and she was a stone wall," Julie says. The family's transfer requests were denied because Thompson wouldn't reimburse the other district for the cost of teaching Luke. Meanwhile, at Berthoud Elementary, with one-on-one training and a trio of teacher's aides constantly at his side, the third-grader was advancing in such areas as writing...