The Wallkill Central School District (WCSD) is refusing to comply with a New York State Education Department Impartial Hearing Officer’s orders to provide the equivalent of almost two years’ worth of education to a 10-year-old Wallkill student with disabilities to make up for the education it should have provided to her in previous years.

At their meeting on Aug. 19, the WCSD Board of Education voted unanimously to not comply with the order and to appeal it to the New York State Education Department’s Office of State Review.

WCSD was ordered to provide the student 1,655 hours of compensatory education after the hearing officer found that the district violated federal and state law by not providing the student a legally required free appropriate public education for a portion of the 2016-2017 school year and all of the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years.

The 1,665 hours of compensatory education that the WCSD was ordered to provide to the student includes 902 hours of compensatory academic services, 255 hours of compensatory occupational therapy, 250 hours of Board Certified Behavior Analyst supervision services, 156 hours of compensatory speech language services and 102 hours of compensatory physical therapy services.

The student carries the diagnosis of a rare genetic disorder that has significantly impacted her motor skills and muscle tone, causing delays in the typical acquisition of speech, reading and writing abilities. WCSD’s refusal to comply with the hearing officer’s order to provide the student the education she was due years ago means her skills and education level will fall even further behind those of her peers.

Vanessa Gronbach, the hearing officer for this case, found that the district consistently failed to implement the student’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) by failing to frequently assess and then develop a plan to address her difficulties with reading, speaking and writing. She also found that the district consistently ignored her parents’ requests for such assessments. The hearing officer noted that WCSD placed the student in learning environments that did not support her needs, which led to her educational goals not being worked on and no meaningful progress being made towards those goals. Independent evaluators indicated that the student actually regressed in her abilities during the school years in question.

“I am appalled by what our district is doing,” said Amanda McKelvey, the student’s mother. “Instead of providing our daughter with compensatory educational services to make up for the education she should have received in the first place, WCSD continues to use taxpayer funds to pay its outside lawyers to drag this case out and inflict as much hardship as possible on our family.”

According to the hearing officer, WCSD’s failure to comply with federal law and provide the student with a legally required free appropriate public education is due in large part to WCSD placing the student from Dec. 2017 until Feb. 2019 at Abilities First in Cornwall and then at its New Windsor location. Abilities First provides programs and services for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Audio recordings reviewed by the hearing officer revealed that during the student’s time at Abilities First she was yelled at, cursed at, berated and abused by staff. The student’s family contends the student was also physically abused. They noted that she was dragged by a staff member across the classroom. In addition, Abilities First did not provide the student with the number of staff required by her IEP. Many staff members were recorded on audio lamenting about how understaffed Abilities First was.

“Not only did WCSD fail to comply with federal and state law and fail to provide a free appropriate public education to a student with a disability, but for roughly two and a half years, WCSD failed to provide this child any semblance of a meaningful education thanks to its placing her at Abilities First,” said Gina DeCrescenzo of the Gina DeCrescenzo, P.C. law firm and the attorney for the student and her family. “Worse than simply failing to educate the student, the record here shows that Abilities First, which was endorsed by WCSD, harmed her, causing academic and functional regression, as well as psychological damage.”

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) ensures that students with disabilities are afforded a free appropriate public education. If school districts receive federal funding, they must comply with the IDEA. Two purposes of the IDEA are to ensure that students with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education that provides them special education and related services to help them transition to adulthood and to ensure that their legal rights and the legal rights of their parents are protected. Under the IDEA, if a school district fails to implement a student’s IEP, that failure legally functions as the denial of a free appropriate public education.

The hearing officer’s decision comes on the heels of the New York State Education Department’s Special Education Quality Assurance group recently auditing WCSD. The results of that audit released in Aug. 2017 revealed that WCSD was not complying with New York State and federal standards for special education services and as a result, failed students similar to the ways it failed the student here, including inadequate evaluations and failing to provide a continuum of services.

“Wallkill taxpayers should be livid that WCSD has the gall to challenge the hearing officer’s award of compensatory education here in light of how her order lays out WCSD’s complete failure to comply with federal law regarding the student’s education and how it placed her in what both the hearing officer and WCSD’s Director of Pupil Personnel Services said was an abusive environment at Abilities First,” DeCrescenzo said. “WCSD’s refusal to comply with the hearing officer’s order sends a clear message to parents of disabled children in Wallkill: ‘We will fight you tooth and nail to deny your child’s legal right to a free appropriate public education.’”

Now DeCrescenzo’s office is in the process of developing responsive papers to the district’s appeal. The papers and appeal will be reviewed by the New York State Education Department’s Office of State Review. If the district loses at the State Review they have the ability to appeal at the Federal Court level.

“What sets this case apart in a very, very major way from any other case is that they really don’t have grounds to appeal,” DeCrescenzo said. “Tragically the record in this case really revealed that not only did the defendant, the district, fail to provide this young child with a free appropriate public education, which is the standard that the hearing officer decided in favor of, but for much of that time it failed to provide any semblance of a meaningful education.”

Kevin Castle, Wallkill Superintendent, declined to comment when contacted by the Times.