Have You No Shame?: Naperville School District Said to “Blackmail” Parents

Just found this on AutismVox. Particularly interesting to me since I just attended a workshop on the Tango! last week and saw video of Killian working on the device with his therapist.

It’s hard not to be alarmed on reading the title for a July 15th article in the Naperville Sun:
Judge: Dist. 203 ‘blackmailed’ parents Kevin and Beth Hynes of Naperville, IL, took legal action against their school district for withholding their autistic 6-year-old son Killian’s augmentative communication device, a Tango. Killian is nonverbal and the Tango, his father noted, “….is as important to Killian as a wheelchair would be to a child with a physical disability.” Killian started using the Tango in January and its use was written into his IEP. When summer came, a dispute arose regarding Killian’s school placement and the school staff’s ability to use it; the Hynes wanted their son to attend the more “technologically advanced Carol Stream program” instead of the Summit school, where he had been placed and was “bored and regressing.” Then this chain of events happened: And, Kevin said, they were willing to pay the difference - about $100 a week for nine weeks - despite the provision of laws such as the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Laws such as these require school districts to pay for placement of special needs students like Killian in private, out-of-district facilities if parents, teachers and administrators determine that the student’s needs can’t be met within the district. “IDEA isn’t supposed to be about how much it costs. It’s about if it’s appropriate for the kid, he gets it,” Hynes said. “Still, I understand everybody has a budget, and we’re willing to work within that.” In various e-mails to the Hyneses, District 203 administrators agreed that Killian wasn’t getting what he needed at Summit. They indicated interest in the Carol Stream program, but they also expressed concerns regarding its costs.
The matter remained unresolved as of June 11, when Killian’s summer IEP was set to begin, and when Kevin dropped by District 203 to pick up the new Tango. When he got there, administrators told him he couldn’t have it. Then, in correspondence with the Hyneses, special education and students’ rights attorney Laura Sinars, District 203’s legal counsel, indicated the only way District 203 would provide the device would be if the Hyneses agreed to send Killian to one of two programs the district preferred. District 203 either wanted to continue sending him to Summit for the summer, or enroll him in a District 203 program, which Killian’s IEP team already had deemed an inappropriate fit for his needs, Kevin said. But District 203 Superintendent Alan Leis said the district believes it can provide appropriate instruction for Killian within the school system. “We weren’t opposed to the technology at all,” he said. “We just wanted it integrated into a longer-term solution.”………. The Hyneses had a different take on the situation than did District 203. “I’m like, ‘That’s coercion. My son needs a communication device, and you can’t coerce me,’” Kevin said. Judges agree with the Hynses and “severely scolded” the school district. Said Federal Judge Milton Shadur: “The undisputed picture here is regrettably one of the defendants holding, I guess, a 6-year-old autistic boy hostage, depriving him of what is without dispute really a promised Tango communication device, something that everyone agrees - even the professionals agree - is essential to his effective functioning……… And to hold that back as what has to be viewed, I regret to say, as blackmail for his parents, seeking to compel them to accept a program that the defendant’s own professionals have found not to be in his best interest.” The judge also posed the same question asked to no one other than U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954: “Have you no shame?” Some parents have referred to the misconduct hearings of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who first linked the MMR vaccine to autism, as a “witch hunt“: The web has been clogged with news stories about this today. But when a federal judge speaks of a school district as holding an augmentative communication device “hostage” and “blackmailing” the parents of an autistic child, I think there is some serious misconduct going on, indeed.