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Days before her 9-year-old daughter started the school year, Suzette received crushing news about the girl’s special education services at her Bronx Catholic school.
For years, as part of its legal obligation to support students with disabilities in private and parochial schools, New York City’s Education Department had covered the cost of services for Suzette’s daughter, who is hearing impaired. That included a device to amplify her teacher’s voice in her hearing aid, speech therapy, and an aide to make sure she understands what’s happening during class.
But on Aug. 26, Suzette learned that the department had decided her daughter was no longer eligible for those services — not because she didn’t need them but because Suzette had missed a June 1 deadline to request them. The news left Suzette angry that her daughter was denied for what felt like a technicality, and facing a choice between letting the services lapse or paying out of pocket.
“I can’t imagine what this year is going to look like and how much further behind she’ll be for fifth grade without that extra support,” said Suzette, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect the family’s privacy.
In an effort to address ballooning costs and some cases of alleged fraud, the city’s Education Department recently stepped up enforcement of the June 1 deadline for special education services — one long enshrined in state law but loosely enforced — while simultaneously giving families less notice about the deadline than in past years. The Education Department sent families who missed the cutoff boilerplate notices that their students would not receive services, ranging from speech therapy to tutoring, for the rest of the school year.
The Education Department has already heard from roughly 1,300 families who missed the deadline but still want services, officials said.
The ramped up enforcement of the June 1 deadline is part of a larger crackdown on a system city officials say has run amok. In a separate policy shift over the summer, state officials passed an emergency regulation preventing private school families from bringing legal actions, called due process complaints, in certain special education cases.
But the crackdown has already denied critical services to kids who rely on them and could make it far more difficult for families to access support in the future, according to interviews with more than a dozen families, advocates, and legal experts.
John Farago, a hearing officer who has ruled on special education legal claims for decades, said the moves are deeply troubling.
“The city’s Education Department has now for this last year — in the most aggressive and vicious way I’ve seen in the more than 40 years I have been conducting hearings — tried to do everything they can to stop these children who attend private schools from getting special ed services at all,” he said.
Department officials say they are addressing urgent problems with the system. The cost of providing special education services for children in private schools has exploded, as have the number of legal complaints filed by those families. City lawyers also point to incidents of alleged fraud in which they believe providers have artificially inflated prices to bilk more money from the city, or failed to provide services for which they charged.
“We’re going to discover that there’s substantial fraud in this space.”
— Education Department General Counsel Liz Vladeck
Last school year, the city received roughly 26,000 legal complaints related to special education, and it paid out $1.35 billion on those claims, officials said. That’s up from 6,000 cases and $189 million in payments a decade ago, officials said.
“It’s out of control,” said Education Department General Counsel Liz Vladeck in a recent interview.
A 2022 New York Times investigation found that growth in payments for services such as tutoring has been fueled in large part by the city’s Hasidic schools, called yeshivas. More than half of special education complaints in the 2021-22 school year came from neighborhoods in Brooklyn with the highest concentrations of such schools. The Times found that some agencies have been paid millions to provide services, but the services were not always needed or provided.
City officials said that tightening restrictions is the only way to get a better handle on the problem.
“At the end of the day, we’re going to discover that there’s substantial fraud in this space,” Vladeck said. “I think that there are more than a few bad actors.”
Advocates and families who spoke to Chalkbeat, however, said that the city’s blanket enforcement is denying critical services to families who did nothing wrong while failing to address the root causes of the rising costs.
“They’re using a hammer to kill a fly. It’s going to greatly harm children who need services,” said M’Ral Broodie-Stewart, a lawyer at Staten Island Legal Services.
City officials take aim at ballooning special education complaints
The crisis stems in part from the city’s obligation under an unusually expansive state law.
Under federal law, public school systems are required to pay for private school tuition and services for students with disabilities if they can’t provide an appropriate public option. But a New York State law passed in 2007 goes a step further: Students have an individual right to special education services even if they could be served in a public school. In those cases, parents are still on the hook to pay for private school tuition, but their children may receive therapies and tutoring paid for by the city.
Those services can take place at private schools, in students’ homes, or at separate centers.
While cases involving tuition reimbursement soak up a disproportionate share of the attention from politicians and the media, it’s the latter types of cases — where parents pay tuition but seek city-funded services — that have exploded in number and cost in recent years.
Of the more than 26,000 complaints filed last year, about two-thirds came from families whose kids could have been served in public schools. The city spent north of $500 million on those students last year, Vladeck estimated, noting the city has not historically tracked those costs separately.
City officials didn’t provide one single explanation for the boom in cases. But they described a strained system that has become costly, inefficient, and ripe for fraud.
One problem is that the city has nowhere near enough special education teachers to match with the private school students who need them as demand has grown, Vladeck said.
The city instead offers vouchers to families to find their own private special education teachers, issuing some 15,000 vouchers this year. Families have long complained that the vouchers don’t pay enough for most private providers, even after the city doubled its hourly rate last year, from around $42 to $86. In cases where providers charge more than the value of the voucher, or are unwilling to deal with a longer commute to a student’s neighborhood, families routinely file legal complaints to force the city to accept a different provider, often at a higher cost.
City officials contend their updated voucher offers a fair market rate, and they say that some providers are taking advantage of both the city and families by failing to provide promised services, or using unqualified teachers.
The current system has driven costs for the city far beyond what other districts spend and what federal law requires, and it raises questions about the state’s 2007 law, Vladeck argues.
“Is it the right thing to expect the school district to have 10,000 itinerant teachers that can be deployed?” Vladeck said. “What we’re looking at in terms of the demand here is not something that I think anybody ever envisioned.”
Disagreements over how to fix the system
Though there’s little disagreement that the current system is riddled with flaws, there are sharp disagreements about who’s to blame and how to fix it.
Education Department officials argue they’re obligated to act decisively to rein in costs and root out fraud. That’s why officials are enforcing the June 1 deadline, one of several steps they’re taking to vet requests for services.
The other major change, approved over the summer by the state’s Board of Regents, bars families from bringing due process complaints in cases where the city’s voucher didn’t cover the full cost of a special education teacher. Instead, the city has set up a new system run by the Education Department to resolve those cases – one Vladeck says will help the city quickly spot and shut down possible fraud.
“They’re using a hammer to kill a fly.”
— M’Ral Broodie-Stewart, Staten Island Legal Services
But to many families and advocates, the city’s crackdown seems to punish families for problems for which the Education Department is ultimately responsible. After all, children have a right to the services, like the extra tutoring, in special education plans that the Education Department is responsible for crafting.
“You don’t fix documented incidents of abuse by attacking the children,” said Farago, the hearing officer. “You fix them by solving the underlying problem: You hire, or develop, a large cohort of [special education] teachers. You do what it takes to make sure that children receive the services you know they need.”
Some advocates are particularly concerned that the changes to the due process system will make it far harder for families to file complaints, and they are unsure how the new system set up by the city will work.
“The hearings will go down by 8,000 or 10,000 this year. That doesn’t mean that these kids no longer need the services,” said Jesse Cutler, a partner at Regina Skyer and Associates, a law firm that represents families in special education cases. “The DOE is able to wipe their hands clean.”
City officials said that families who have lodged requests for higher rates for special education teachers in the new city-run system will hear back within 60 days and have a right to appeal with the state.
Families caught in the city’s dragnet
Perhaps the most controversial, and consequential, of the Education Department’s recent changes was the decision to strictly enforce the June 1 deadline.
Suzette’s daughter, who depends on a listening device and help from an aide to make sure accommodations are in place for her hearing impairment, is suddenly without that help. The city has also stopped paying for her speech therapy sessions.
The Bronx family chose a Catholic school because of its quiet classrooms and strict discipline. A public school they considered seemed noisy by comparison, and Suzette feared her daughter might struggle to hear the teachers. Plus, Suzette said the local public schools she attended growing up felt dangerous, and she worried her daughter might face bullying due to her disability.
The city’s sudden enforcement of the June 1 deadline caught Suzette off guard. The Education Department used to automatically send notices informing families at private schools that they must request special education services by June 1, which prompted Suzette to send in the paperwork each year. But the city did not send similar notices this year — in yet another bid to reduce fraud.
“We’ve seen notarizations that are false or dated before the parent’s signature, or that purport to be from parents, but it’s the same handwriting on a few dozen of them,” Vladeck said.
But without the reminder to submit the paperwork, the requirement slipped Suzette’s mind. Just days before the school year started, the city informed her that her daughter was no longer eligible.
“I felt like that was malicious, that was intentional,” Suzette said. She noted that at her annual meeting with city Education Department staffers to renew her daughter’s services for this school year, which occurred on June 4, no one mentioned she’d missed the deadline.
Now, she’s in damage control mode. She is working to line up group speech therapy sessions that she’ll pay for out of pocket, at about $35 each. Her daughter’s learning plan entitles her to one-on-one services three times a week, though Suzette is unsure whether she’ll be able to afford it and is waiting for a quote on the cost.
“This whole thing does feel like a punishment,” she said.
Jennifer Varvara, whose 14-year-old has autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, said her teen’s services were similarly yanked for missing the deadline. Her son attends Monsignor Farrell High School in Staten Island and was supposed to receive speech and occupational therapy and tutoring.
“It seems like the city just decided to do this out of nowhere and not actually let anybody know, which is really a horrible thing to do,” Varvara said. “You’re preying on special needs kids who need these services for a reason.”
City officials have told families who missed the deadline that they are working to provide services once they’ve lined up support for families who met the June 1 cutoff, though it’s unclear when that might happen.
The Education Department has also offered families a different solution: enrolling in a public school.
Many families said that wasn’t a realistic option so close to the start of the school year. They were unlikely to get refunded for tuition they’d already paid, and they didn’t want to disrupt their child’s education.
Even some parents who say they met the June 1 deadline have struggled to get help.
Rosanna Gioia, a Staten Island mom, said she mailed in her annual request for services about a week before the deadline, but didn’t receive a confirmation. She dashed off an email on June 3 to double check.
The next day, an Education Department rep confirmed the city received Gioia’s request for services, which includes counseling, speech therapy, and extra help from a special education teacher to help address her seventh grade daughter’s severe anxiety and selective mutism.
But on Aug. 28, in response to an inquiry from Gioia about counseling services, department officials said her daughter wouldn’t be eligible for any special education support.
A boilerplate email claimed she missed the deadline.
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.
Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.