“J.K.” is suing his public schools for having failed to prepare him for post-secondary work or further education. According to an Associated Press report by Martha Raffaele (PennLive.com), the young man has primary- or elementary-level academic skills and struggled just to be able to pursue training as a plumber.
A 20-year-old learning-disabled man is suing a school district, alleging that it inadequately prepared him to enter college or the work force after he graduated from high school two years ago.
The federal complaint alleges that the Southern York County School District made few changes to the special-education services it was providing to the student, even though annual standardized tests consistently showed that he lacked basic reading and writing skills. The man, identified in court papers only as J.K., filed the lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg.
This will be a story worth following. I remember a case that fascinated me during my graduate-school days. It was Peter Doe vs. San Fransisco School District (later Peter was identified as “Peter W”). Peter (and his parents) didn’t prevail in his case. I fear this case will likely meet a similar fate. (If you’re interested in law and special education, by the way, see Pete and Pam Wright’s WrightsLaw site.)
But, I was very taken with the idea of the courts providing a remedy. Combining that legal approach with evidence about effective instruction in early reading from that era, I hung a paper called “Reading and the Mentally Retarded: Look! Look! See Who Could be Going to Court!” at a meeting of the American Association for Mental Retardion in the 70s. I wish I still had a copy of it.
Here’s a list of some resources from those days as well as some I just grabbed from the Internet:
- Peter W. v. San Francisco Sch. Dist., 131 Cal.Rptr. 854 (1976)
- Don Stewart’s book called Educational Malpractices: the Big Gamble in Our Schools (Pasadena, CA: Slate Services). Stewart outlined malpractices and suggested legal theories for action. The book’s not in the LOC catalog; Amazon has copies, though.
- Stephen Sugarman (1974; “If Johnny Can’t Read—Get Yourself a Lawyer”; Learning, Number 2, pp. 26-31) suggested suits under fraud, malpractice, and other theories.
- Ronald Standler’s Educational Malpractice in the USA, which has a summary of Peter W.
- Russell Smith’s Educational Malpractice: Given the National Goals for Education, are Courts Prepared to Recognize this Cause of Action? from BYU’s Education and Law Journal.
- Educational Accountability And Malpractice and Student Failure to Learn/Academic Damages Actions from VCU’s Commonwealth Educational Policy Institute Publication (R. Vacca, editor).
- David Ferleger represented Matthew Carr in a similar case in Pennsylvania; Mr. Ferleger published a copy of his complaint that’s available here.
- The June 2001 Quarterly Report of the Indiana State Board of Education (link to download a PDF)
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