Law & Courts

Law Day

By Christina A. Samuels — August 08, 2008 1 min read
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I don’t want On Spec Ed to turn into a special education law blog, because many have staked out that ground quite well, as you can see by checking my blogroll. But I’ve happened to run across a handful of interesting law-related items:

My colleague Mark Walsh wrote today about an appeals court ruling that placing a disruptive student in “timeout” repeatedly did not violate the student’s constitutional rights.

H. Jeffrey Marcus, an attorney in western New York state who represents parents, has blogged about a U.S. District court decision that denies reimbursement for private placement to a parent who said his child’s drug use and emotional disability were intertwined. The court decided that schools are not responsible for reimbursing private drug treatment. However, at the federal level, Mr. Marcus says, at least one federal court has found differently.

(By the way, “SRO” in that blog means “state review officer,” one step up from the “impartial hearing officer” who hears disputes between schools and parents.)

Parent attorney Pete Wright shares a little advice about how tapes of individualized education program meetings could be used during due process hearings.

Finally, the Department of Education’s office for civil rights found that the Seattle-area Shoreline district violated the rights of students when it did not make room in its classrooms for children with disabilities who had been placed at a state residential facility for people with disabilities. The Seattle Times has the story.

A version of this news article first appeared in the On Special Education blog.