For Black Families, AISD's Special Ed Chaos Is Not New

AISD parent Helen Miller stands outside LBJ High School (Photo by Jana Birchum)

This spring, Austin ISD's special education department has faced a staffing shortage, a leadership transition, and a lawsuit from Disability Rights Texas about delays in thousands of student evaluations, which determine who is eligible for what special education services. The situation was shocking for some – after all, some students had been denied necessary assistance for over a year, as evaluations were pushed back. But it felt very familiar to Helen Mil­ler. More than a decade ago, in 2008, Miller, who is Black, filed a complaint against AISD for not providing her daughter Javisha Green with appropriate special education services – in part because Green attended LBJ High School, which Miller said lacked resources afforded to other schools.

The current special education dysfunction has affected families across the district, but some have felt its impact more than others. In Austin, Latinx and especially Black students disproportionately receive special education services; the latter comprise 11% of special ed students, but only 6.6% of the district's total enrollment. Many advocates see recent events as inevitable for a system that has swallowed up Black students while often failing to serve them. That pattern "has not just started in AISD," Miller told the Chronicle. "This has been going on for decades."

Miller said that after she filed her complaint, AISD began to provide Green, who has ADHD and dyslexia, with services such as one-on-one support. But at the time of her graduation, Green could still only read at a sixth-grade level. Resource disparities between campuses such as LBJ, a Title I school that is 97% Black and Hispanic, and the district's wealthier schools can create "two totally different experiences" for students, according to one former AISD school psychologist who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Even when students with disabilities are promised a specific level of services in their individualized education programs (IEPs), staffing shortages can mean some get shortchanged.

"I frequently am in the position where I have more students than I can appropriately serve and meet their IEP hours. At that point, I then request support through the district, and typically I don't hear back," said a special education teacher who works at a Title I elementary school. "We know teachers who have been injured on the job, students who've been injured, and most of that could be prevented by having enough staff to use antecedent strategies [to prevent aggressive behavior]."

Assistant Superintendent for Student Programs Dr. Dessynie Edwards, who oversees special education, said AISD would address staffing and resource inequities going forward by creating a "director of campus support" position to oversee resource allocation and, if a teacher requested help, to "make some immediate decisions" on what resources to provide.

"It appears that previously, those campuses who would request the resources, those would be the campuses who received them," Edwards said. "So we go back to ... parents who know what to ask for, or don't have an idea of what to ask for. So what we are looking at is not equalizing those resources, but making those resources available in terms of equity."

Education Austin organizer Matt Inman sees Austin special education as a reflection of an age-old dynamic: "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." That is, parents who can show up and advocate for their students will receive the most resources – and those parents are likely to be white and affluent.

For educator Candace Hunter, advocacy was needed to ensure an IEP was followed for her son, John-Mark, who has autism and ADHD. Hunter, who is Black, worried her son's needs wouldn't be met at school. So she spent hours writing introductory letters to John-Mark's teachers to start each year, soothing her son after class meltdowns, checking that homework assignments were appropriate, and ensuring John-Mark knew she – and his teachers – had high expectations for him.

"If your child is a Black male and they have been admitted to special education and are receiving services, then you better damn well stay on the school," Hunter said. "Because at some point, you're gonna have to battle it out with these people. And it should not be that way."

Without her monitoring, which could take more than 20 hours a week, Hunter fears her son would have been caught up in campus discipline, stereotyped because of his disability, size, gender, and race. He "probably wouldn't have graduated high school" if those needs weren't met, she said. As it is, he's set to graduate this spring from Northeast Early College High School.

This sort of informed engagement is what Maria Hernandez works to promote, especially for underprivileged families. Hernan­dez founded VELA, a nonprofit which helps families who need to engage with the district's special education process. When a student is first referred to special education, AISD hasn't historically rolled out the welcome mat. Instead, Edwards said parents get some forms to sign and a procedural safeguards manual – a legal document full of "acronym soup."

"They show up helpless and hopeless," Dr. Audrey M. Sorrells, an associate professor at the UT College of Education who studies equity in special education, told us. "They don't realize, 'Wow, I could have shown up with the advocate with me, or another supportive friend, or my attorney?'"

AISD's Edwards said the district plans numerous reforms to help parents understand the process better. These could include introductory information sessions for parents, as well as more opportunities during meetings to ask questions and for evaluators and administrators to offer "explanations using language that our parents can understand" in addition to their technical evaluations.

Educators, parents, and advocates alike all feel AISD can and must do more to engage with new special education families and to support teachers at the campus level. In doing so, they have much more to reckon with than just the delays and staffing issues of the last several years.

"It's just like a leak in your house, right?" Hunter said. "You find out where the leak is coming from, and then you fix that leak, and I think that's what the district needs to do. But the district didn't do that 10 years ago ... and now your entire damn house was flooded. ... Eventually, mold is going to take hold. And eventually, you will have to tear it down."