Disability advocates hailed the U.S. Department of Education’s finding that Texas for years put roadblocks in the path of children who potentially qualified for special education—a clear violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
“It shows that they are willing to stand up when a state is clearly not doing what’s right,” said Robbi Cooper, a leader of the parent advocacy group Decoding Dyslexia Texas and the mother of a son with dyslexia. “Now let’s just hope that we can get the policies right.”
The Jan. 11 monitoring report from the office of special education services—the first to be issued under the leadership of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos—outlines a series of IDEA violations by the state.
In conversations with Texas parents and educators, federal officials heard conflicting reports about how children with dyslexia should be screened and served. Children who struggled in school were shifted to response-to-intervention programs that were supposed to meet their needs, but, once there, some languished for years, the monitoring report said…
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