Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 24, 1995 TAG: 9505240073
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Medium
The disagreement caused Terry and Roberta Nester to pull their son, David, out of the city school system for 1994-95 and send him to the Achievement Center in Roanoke for the third grade. But the couple could not afford the cost of speech and language classes for their son at the school.
Monday, the Nesters took the matter to a due process hearing, which lasted seven hours.
Hearing Officer Louis Dene hopes to have a decision by July on the Nesters' request that their son be placed back in a class for learning disabled children rather than in a classroom for children with emotional and behavioral problems. Before ruling on the Nesters' complaint, he must decide whether the couple has legal standing to ask for the hearing.
Kathleen Mehfoud, representing the school system, reminded Dene that he had dismissed the due process hearing last year after both sides reached an agreement on the issues. "The Nesters at this time are subjecting the school system to unnecessary expense and harassment," she said.
Terry Nester, representing himself, said the agreement was based on a letter from Marion lawyer J. Patton Graham. He said he had talked with Graham for a few minutes by telephone, but had not hired or authorized him to act in the matter.
During the 1991-92 school year, David was placed in a learning disabled class in first grade and taken out for 30 minutes each day for training in social skills. In the second grade, he was in a classroom for children with emotional and behavioral problems in which the teacher reinforced social skills all day.
"We felt that his academic progress was declining, that it had been much better the year before," Roberta Nester testified. "We wanted him to go to an LD [learning disabled] classroom instead of an emotionally disturbed classroom."
She and her husband said they were left with the impression that this is what would happen after a meeting with the Individual Educational Plan Committee about their son. When they learned otherwise, they took him out of Radford's McHarg Elementary School.
"A year was taken out of a child's life," Terry Nester said. He said his son, classified as language-impaired and other-health-impaired, has attention deficit disorder.
Mehfoud said David's Individual Educational Plan could not have been implemented in the classroom for learning disabled children, that the boy had never been classified as learning disabled and that the decision was administrative rather than parental. She said the committee decided that taking the boy out of class for 30 minutes for social skills had not worked.
Sandra Lenhart, who teaches the class for children with behavioral problems, said the boy required constant reinforcement of social skills throughout the day and that both his academic and social skills had improved. Had he been in that class this year, she said, "there's no doubt he would have made progress."
"He needed the consistency of the same teacher," agreed Marsha Dunaway, special education-learning disabled teacher who worked with him in first and second grades.
She said he was withdrawn, had difficulty concentrating, did not interact with other children and became aggressive toward anyone who came near him the first year, but that many of those conditions had been somewhat alleviated during the second year.
Terry Nester claimed that Dunaway never reported this list of behaviors to him. He said a psychologist who had been working with his son withdrew last summer saying she could no longer be effective, and he blamed the school system's subpoenaing of his son's psychological records for her withdrawal.
Mehfoud reminded Roberta Nester, under cross-examination, that the parents had given permission for their son to be enrolled in the class for children with behavioral and emotional problems during second grade. "I didn't know we had a right to contest it," Nester said.
by CNB