2/8/05 -- The requirements of the €o Child Left Behind Act are in direct conflict with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), says Thomas Jobst, superintendent of Ottawa Township (Ill.) High School District 140. As a result, the district, which has just one school, is planning to sue the federal government and the state of Illinois.
“IDEA is tailored to meet the needs of students with specific disabilities, and NCLB requires schools to meet goals set by Illinois for general education students. I don’t think we can comply with IDEA if we comply with NCLB,” says attorney Raymond Hauser of the Scariano, Himes & Petrarca law firm in Chicago, which is representing the district.
He says Ottawa Elementary School District 141 has joined the suit, and other districts have expressed an interest.
Jobst says, “It is not possible, on one hand to follow a student’s IEP (individual education program) and, on the other hand, to ensure that the student is ready to take the same state assessment on the same date as that student’s non-disabled classmates.”
Ottawa Township High School has been identified as in need of improvement for the second year in a row because students with disabilities -- the school’s only subgroup -- failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP).
Students at the school were eligible to transfer to another better-performing school this year, Jobst says, but no one opted to transfer.
NCLB requires high schools to test all students at one grade level in reading and math every year. Under Illinois’ accountability plan for implementing NCLB, high schools test 11th graders on the ACT exam.
NCLB allows 1 percent of a school’s disabled population to take an alternate assessment. Jobst says 20 percent of the students at Ottawa High are in special education. While students with the most profound disabilities take the alternate test, there are plenty of students with learning, emotional, or other disabilities that must take the ACT.
Some of these students are “very low functioning” with IEPs that call for their instruction to focus on “fundamental life skills,” Jobst says. It is unfair to expect these students to perform well on the ACT, which was designed as a college-entrance exam, he says. “In-depth ACT preparation is way out of their realm.”
The Coachella Valley Unified School District in California also plans to file a lawsuit over NCLB. Its main complaint has to do with the requirement of having English language learners -- many of whom are recent immigrants -- pass a test in English.
The Reading, Pa., school district, which lost its NCLB case in state court last August, had filed an appeal and a second lawsuit.
NSBA attorney Tom Hutton predicts there will be more lawsuits against NCLB “because every year the bar gets higher, and more and more schools are going to fail.”
Hutton says the Ottawa lawsuit might have a better chance because it focuses on a legal conflict between IDEA, which requires schools to develop plans to meet the needs of the individual student, and NCLB, which requires all students to conform to a one-size-fits-all achievement timeline.
“The suit also should be harder for politicians to dismiss as ‘whining,’” he says, “because of IDEA’s requirements and because parents of special-needs children may join as plaintiffs. Some districts are stuck between a rock and an IEP.”