My son has attended Lake Highlands Junior High for the past two years. He has ADHD, and as a result has some special needs.? The school accommodates him by sending him to one special education class every day. We have had several ARDs over the past 2 years, most with very little being accomplished. They usually ended up with the administration saying that my son needed to buckle down, pay more attention, and do his work. Never mind that he has been diagnosed as ADHD since he was 3 and has a serious lack of attention span, which results in lost paperwork, lost homework, lost assignments and lost time on test. Their answer has always been the same, he needed to make changes.

In January of this past year my son started to have more severe emotional issues that resulted in a series of traumatic events which culminated with the school having my son arrested and sent to Timberlawn. I was frantic and didn’t know where to turn so I called an old friend who recommended a child advocate. Not knowing what they did, I spent some time speaking to her on the phone and discovered a whole world of rights and services that had been denied to my son.
I was told that I needed to immediately call for an emergency ARD at Lake Highland JH and that she would come with me to ensure that proper procedures were followed and that we would ask for several changes to his IEP. So in early February we had his ARD and what happened in this meeting was nothing short of shocking. I have been going to ARD meetings with my son since he was 3 in Houston. So I know what to expect in these. When we set down and my advocate introduced herself the Vice Principal appeared to get noticeably more uncomfortable. My advocate immediately requested that minutes be taken and insisted that the meeting be recorded ( which is standard protocol apparently). As the meeting progressed my advocate made several request for services from the school for my son.? Repeatedly the Vice Principal would proceed to talk over her and insist that my advocate was not the parent and did not have a right to talk to her. I repeated, as did my advocate that she was representing me and had every right to make request on my behalf. This did not matter to the VP, she kept interrupting and talking ( or shouting) over my advocate.? This kept going on for an hour and a half until the VP got so upset that she quiped ” this meeting is over” and proceeded to get up and leave. During this meeting my advocate asked to see my son’s folder that the school keeps, which is my right by Federal Law. We were repeatedly refused, which culminated when my advocate attempted to take the folder at the end of the meeting and had a tug of war with the VP over the folder which my advocate lost. Essentially this meeting turned into a ” cover our ass” meeting for the school as they stonewalled us and refused to accomplish anything else other than assigning a shadow to my son, who it turned out seemed to have a grudge against my son and would trump teacher’s decisions and tell my son that he was not permitted to do things that other kids were doing. My advocate and I were so disgusted with the the school’s completely unprofessional approach to my son’s issues that we decided to go to the state for Arbitration.

So a month later we spent the day at RISD’s administration building in Richardson. RISD doesn’t mess around, they brought their in-house lawyer and a very expensive hired gun. We started in earnest trying to get them to do what was right with my son and accommodate his disabilities. Something seemingly as trivial as emailing me his homework assignments and putting in place a comprehensive behavior improvement plan ended up being deal breakers. We were told that we would continue working with this hired gun to come to an agreement. Well, it is now July, and this ” hired gun” played dumb waiting until the very end of May to ask us what the hold up was. We had sent her the changes no less than 3 times between March and June and she seemed to never have them and always said she would get back to us in a week.

The school district is being investigated by the Fed’s OCR division that deals with these things, but I don’t expect much from them. It is coming down to our word against theirs and we have discovered that RISD administration has no problem with stonewalling, changing documents, misrepresenting the truth and throwing tax payers money at high priced lawyers who apparently don’t do anything. I have run up a $3500 bill to date just trying to get what is fair for my son.? If you stumbled across this because you are in a similar situation please feel free to contact me and I’ll help you prepare and tell you what to expect. In short expect no mercy, you might as well be going after an evil corporation. They will circle the wagons and cover their ass rather than help your child. You will be harassed and made to feel like you are at fault.

They went so far as to hold my son in his Special Ed class all day several times and count him absent, which resulted in a letter from the County attorney stating that my son had a court date for truancy. I had to make several request to get this fixed. Problem is I don’t know if it has been fixed. The district may have fixed it on their side but that does not mean the county has closed his case.