My 13-year-old son was diagnosed three years ago with both ADHD and depression. He is currently on medications and is doing much better in school. However, he is in parochial school, not public school, as the Washington, D.C. school system has class sizes much too large and too many disciplinary problems to meet his needs. We are considering sending him to a boarding school next year for high school that has very small class sizes and individualized attention to assure that he is able to excel as he is extremely intelligent.
Question - would the public school system provide assistance with tuition for him due to his “disabilities”? How do we proceed? The school is extremely expensive and we pay very high taxes to D.C. Our son has only attended the public school system for one year of his nine years in school. Are there funding sources that we should be aware of to assist us in paying the tuition for a Boarding School?
Thank you.
Dear Ivana:
Your question is whether it is possible to obtain funding from the public school for a placement in a private therapeutic boarding school when the child has not been enrolled in the public school in the past. Although funding under these circumstances is difficult, it is not impossible. There are a number of steps that generally need to be taken in order for there to be a possibility of public funding.
First, well ahead of the enrollment in the private therapeutic school, it is important to approach the public school and reenroll your student as an enrolled non-attending student. Some schools will be resistant to allowing this status. Even if they are, indicate that you are a resident of the district, that you have a child with disabilities that requires special education services and that you are requesting an evaluation from the public school.
After any oral contact, put this request in writing. Obtain copies of any reports, clinical evaluations or other material that support why your child requires placement in the private school. This should generally include up-to-date clinical evaluations that provide current information on your child’s functioning and recommendations for the nature, intensity and type of special education and related services they require, including the need for specialized placement. If the clinicians support specialized placement, they must explain why the recommendations they are making are educationally necessary, even though the public school has not had prior experience with the child.
This information should all be presented to the school district in advance of an IEP meeting to determine placement. Under limited circumstances, the school district may recognize the severity of the child’s needs and agree to pay for residential treatment. Alternatively, they may disagree that residential treatment is needed, but agree to pay for the tuition component of the placement. If they refuse to pay altogether, your recourse would be to request a due process hearing.
Such requests should typically be accompanied by a request for mediation, to determine if there is any ground for negotiating some middle ground. In either event, such requests should be preceded by consultation with a knowledgeable special education attorney to assess whether you and the school have taken the right steps, to assess your chances, and to determine if it is financially wise for you to pursue the school district.
In some instances, families decide that they need to make a private placement without having first approached the school district for assistance. This is called a unilateral placement. If you intend to make a unilateral placement, the law requires that you give the school district written notice ten business days in advance of the placement, indicating that you intend to make the placement, that you intend to do so because you believe the public school cannot meet your child’s needs and that you wish for the public school to pay for the placement. Giving this notice does not obligate the district to pay, but failing to give them the notice may relieve them of responsibility for paying.
The IDEA provides exceptions to this rule if you provide a similar notice at an IEP meeting prior to implementing the private placement or if there is a bona fide emergency which required emergency placement without sufficient time to give the school the legal notice normally required. If you are making an emergency placement, you should make sure to consult with a psychiatrist to confirm the severity of the emergency and to allow for documentation of the emergency need for placement, so as to have a basis documentation of why you were unable to provide the written notice and to make sure that a true emergency existed.
In any of these situations, the possibility of school funding is far more difficult than when a child has been in the public schools, as there is no obvious basis to demonstrate that the public school’s programs have been tried and failed. Further, because residential placement is the most restrictive placement, the public school’s inability to try less restrictive options will be used as an argument by the school district for why they should not be held responsible for the placement.
Topic
Special Education