(2 of 3)
School districts stress that federal law does not require providing the best possible education for students like Luke. Rather, the law, which in 1990 was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, guarantees only a free "appropriate" education. "It doesn't say 'free minimal public education,' and it doesn't say 'free optimal public education,'" says Francisco Negrón, general counsel for the National School Boards Association. "It's somewhere in the middle."
When Congress called for the creation of individualized education programs for special-ed students, the process was designed to be a collaboration between schools and parents, a compromise between scarce dollars and infinite hope. But often there is no such thing as a happy medium. School districts spent approximately $146 million resolving special-ed disputes in 2000, when some 11,000 parents of disabled students asked for due-process hearings to try to get more services for their children. This year the Department of Education expects about 14,000 parents to request such a proceeding, which Peter Wright, a special-ed attorney in Deltaville, Va., likens to a cross between a nasty divorce and a medical-malpractice suit. Each side feels betrayed by the other, and each brings in a slew of expert witnesses. "The cases that are on the table tend to be really difficult, thorny questions," says Andrew Rotherham, co-director of the Washington think tank Education Sector. "How much is enough?"
In the Perkins family's dispute--which has cost the district $191,000 in legal fees--school administrators say the parents are penalizing the district for Luke's behavior off campus. "The issues that they had were really surrounding home," says Karen Pielin, the district's special-ed director. Teachers from Berthoud went to the Perkinses' house to help get Luke on a schedule that would reinforce what he was learning at school. But Luke's father Jeff, a rheumatologist, said that even though they tried hard, the competing needs of their three other children made it impossible to keep Luke on exactly the same regimen 24 hours a day. "Luke's routine," Jeff testified, "is not our only--and cannot even be our main--goal."
The Perkinses repeatedly asked to send Luke back to a district nearby where they felt the teachers were better equipped to handle autistic students. Julie Perkins says she begged Thompson's special-ed director to transfer her son. "I was in tears, and she was a stone wall," Julie says. The family's transfer requests were denied because Thompson wouldn't reimburse the other district for the cost of teaching Luke. Meanwhile, at Berthoud Elementary, with one-on-one training and a trio of teacher's aides constantly at his side, the third-grader was advancing in such areas as writing the alphabet and using a computer mouse. But those skills had to keep being retaught, and Luke's parents regarded him as falling further behind. After hiring a therapist to observe Luke at school, the Perkinses learned that he was spending a lot of time throwing fits on the floor or hiding under a table. "His behavior was so out of control that education was simply a pipe dream," Jeff says.