Over the past three years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has worked to move many students out of separate settings, such as dedicated special education schools, and into their neighborhood schools.
The effort is among a series of steps that the 650,000-student district has made as part of settling a long-running class action lawsuit, which accused LAUSD of neglecting its students with disabilities.
In the second part of a two-part series that aired Tuesday on the PBS NewsHour, Education Week Video explored the impact of that move on two families. One mother spoke of wanting her son to spend more time with his general education peers, but said that school support wasn’t always there for him. Another family says that in doing away with specialized schools, the district is eliminating the most appropriate environment for her child with disabilities.
The second part of the series is embedded below.
And if you missed the first part, you can find it here, along with extra video that introduces us to Chanda Smith. Now an adult, Smith was the Los Angeles student with dyslexia who was the named plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to the sweeping legal settlement.