While the majority of city students were returning for their second week of school last Monday, many disabled children were still at home, waiting to find out where they were supposed to go to class.
Now, three weeks into the new academic calendar, the city remains unaccessible to parents calling for help with their special-needs students, asserted Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum in a report last week.
After conducting a brief survey the week before school started, Gotbaum’s office found that about half of the calls made by investigators to the Committees on Special Education went unreturned or unanswered.
Twenty-two of their 45 calls to the city’s 15 special education offices resulted in non-working phones or unreturned messages, she said. In Queens, investigators could not reach a representative in the committees’ Jamaica and Ozone Park offices — which, together, oversee five districts.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said last Friday that “the problem has been solved,” assuring that all committee phone numbers had been updated on the agency’s Web site. She did not respond to a request for follow-up comments.
Gotbaum says this lack of communication has become all too typical for some parents. “The start of school is always a hectic time for families,” she said. “But the DOE is making things more stressful by failing to do the very basics, such as picking up their phone.
“The bottom line: Queens parents need access and answers, not the run-around.”
Middle Village mom Elizabeth Sager agrees. Her physically-impaired son went more than a week without class this year while local officials scrambled to find an appropriate placement for him.
Earlier in the summer, the same officials had told Sager that her 6-year-old son, who is partially paralyzed, would enter first grade at a new site this fall, after he had struggled to learn in another larger, integrated classroom the previous year.
But in late August, Sager learned that there would be no room for him in the new program. Furious, she drove to her district office in Long Island City, only to find a waiting room full of other angry parents.
Schools officials later sent Sager home with a new phone number — which she says she called every two days until finally getting notice that her son would be starting school at a new location last Wednesday.
“It’s rough trying to get information,” she said. “They (the special education committees) don’t answer phones, and when you get the voice machine, it’s full, so you just keep getting bounced around the system.
“I’m glad my son finally ended up in the right place, but no parent should have to deal with that kind of frustration.”
According to the most recent Mayor’s Management Report, there are 180,890 children in New York City receiving special education services. More than 147,000 of those students are taught in the city’s public school system.
[where: New York, NY]
