PORTLAND, Ore. — Last spring, Brenna Legaard’s teenage son’s emotional outbursts at school escalated, fueled by the departure of a beloved teacher.

A vice principal at Portland’s Ida B. Wells High informed Legaard that if her son, who has autism, wanted to stay at school full-time, administrators could not guarantee his safety.

She had two choices:

Leave him at school, where he could possibly break classroom furniture or harm a classmate, setting him on a path to expulsion.

Or, allow him to spend less time in school, suspending his federally protected right to a full public education.

An Oregon law passed in 2023 was supposed to prevent parents from having to make such tough decisions.

The law was intended to make it much harder for school districts to consign children to less than the typical six- to seven-hour school day because educators and administrators deemed their medical or behavioral needs too great for school personnel to handle. The law gave the Oregon Department of Education expanded powers to require school districts to comply.

But its first year of implementation was unpredictable and sometimes rocky. Teachers say the law added loads of paperwork and meetings, stretching them thin. Some families, including Legaard’s, say they feel pushed to choose between their child’s physical safety and their education. Others hail the new law for helping them negotiate a way forward on behalf of their children, and say they’re hopeful for even more progress as their students head back to class over the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, some disability advocates charge that the state education department didn’t do enough to support districts struggling to meet the law’s requirements, even though the agency has known for at least eight years that schools were denying too many students the full day to which they are legally entitled and needed coaching on how to do better. They also say that, without auditing or a rigorous confirmation process, the agency’s data oversight has gaping holes.

“Schools are reverting to punitive approaches to behavioral disabilities,” said Tom Stenson, the deputy legal counsel for advocacy group Disability Rights Oregon.

The state education agency says that in fall 2023, 1,671 students began the year on shortened school days. By June, 1,417 students were on reduced hours. Students move on and off of abbreviated schedules through the year, a spokesperson for the agency noted. Overall, 2,716 students had time — typically many hours — cut from their day for at least some portion of the 2023-2024 school year.

‘The hardest bill I’ve ever worked on’

As written, the shortened school days law is a departure from the state’s usual deference to school districts. It took effect immediately, instead of being gently phased in over a number of years, and left little wiggle room. Districts that fail to follow the new rules can see their state funding yanked, a nearly unheard of tactic in Oregon — though in its first year, no district met that fate.

Under the new law, parents must agree in writing to their children being placed on a reduced schedule. And every month, the school must give families a formal chance to revoke their permission. If parents say no to shortened days, schools need to be ready to offer the child a full of school within five days.

School districts must report monthly to the education department how many students were on shortened schedules and for what reason.

The law faced pushback from some powerful education lobbyists, who argued that it would infringe on the state’s long tradition of local control for school districts. Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, a Corvallis Democrat who was its chief backer, is herself a parent of a child with a disability. She made the legislation a personal crusade during the tumultuous 2023 session, when a prolonged Republican walkout derailed many policy bills. It was, she says now, “likely the hardest bill I have ever worked on. I didn’t expect there to be debate about equal access to full-time school.”

Potential legal action lent urgency to the legislative negotiations. Disability Rights Oregon had filed a class action lawsuit against the state on behalf of hundreds of Oregon students placed on shortened schedules. Lawmakers faced a choice: Do something or a federal judge would do it for them. After the law passed and the education agency directed school districts to follow it, a federal judge dismissed the suit.

Educators and other disability advocates agree there are legitimate reasons why some children may not be able to attend school all day, every day. A child undergoing leukemia treatment, for example, may not have the physical strength to be in all their classes. Or older older students with disabilities, in adult transition programs, may have job responsibilities during school hours.

But in many cases, Oregon students who are not allowed to attend school full-time have the time and stamina to be in school. They are pushed out because their hard-to-address behavior issues or medical needs require more dedicated, expert attention from adults than the school feels able to or knows how to supply.

Stenson, with Disability Rights Oregon, said that while some districts have made progress, others have resorted to obtaining parental consent with scare tactics.

Legaard is well aware of her son’s rights under both federal and state regulations. She’s a lawyer who previously sued Portland Public Schools over plans to relocate Pioneer School, a program for students with complex needs. But the situation at Ida B. Wells was acute, she said: In her son’s classes for students with complex behavioral needs, other parents reported that their children were spending hours aimlessly surfing YouTube.

“We just didn’t feel like he was safe (at Ida B. Wells),” she said.

Sydney Kelly, a spokesperson for Portland Public School said that the district “embraced the purpose of Senate Bill 819 and has implemented processes in compliance with its requirements,” including “meaningful access to the educational program and informed parent consent.”

‘We didn’t provide them the help’

Legaard’s story is emblematic of a wider problem, said Meghan Moyer, public policy director at Disability Rights Oregon who is running for a seat on the Multnomah County Commission.

“We have asked teachers, principals and administrators to stop a practice that they have done for quite a long time in many districts,” Moyer said. “But we didn’t provide them the help to know how to do it differently.”

Moyer and Stenson say the Oregon Department of Education isn’t yet working proactively and consistently with districts that have the highest concentrations of students on shortened school days to help them figure out how to better support students with complex needs. And the education agency relies on school districts to report how many students are on abbreviated schedules.

“There’s nobody who is going out to the districts, as best I can tell,” Stenson said. “No auditing. No confirmation process. So, if there’s a school district that used to have 50 kids on shortened school days, and now they say they have zero, let’s audit that. And let’s find out how they did that. If those 50 kids are now sitting in a back hallway, getting no educational services whatsoever, they are technically in school, but maybe (the state) can offer some guidance on how to make their time in school more effective.”

State education officials acknowledge that the first year left room for improvement, but they insist they are making measurable progress.

Gelser Blouin, who has not shied from criticizing the agency in the past, said it deserves credit for its work so far on training and monitoring data in real-time, though she said there’s still a lot of work ahead, particularly in training for paraprofessionals who are called upon to carry out behavior support plans.

Tenneal Wetherell, chief of staff to agency head Charlene Williams, said the agency is rolling out a refined data collection system to drill down in new ways.

Twelve specialists assigned to different regions of the state review districts’ data, looking for common themes, Wetherell said.

“We make proactive calls to school districts and ask questions about the data, so we can intervene where there is confusion or address issues before they occur,” she added.

Training and support efforts for local districts are still in the works, Wetherell said, particularly when it comes to addressing behavior so that a child can stay in school full-time.

“We’re at the beginning of an engaged, two-way conversation around the needs of individual school districts in each community,” Wetherell said. “I think the next stage is a real investment in what school districts need in terms of intervention support, and how best to get that to them.”

The issue is particularly complicated because special education is one of the hardest-to-fill job categories for school districts and is perpetually underfunded.

Some special education teachers report struggling with the increased paperwork and monthly meetings necessitated by the law, on top of an already meetings-heavy schedule to discuss each of their students’ federally mandated individualized education programs.

Abagail Darby, a special education teacher at Jefferson Elementary School in Marion County, said she and her colleagues want all children to be in school. But Senate Bill 819’s new rules meant “countless phone calls, emails and follow-up meetings” in its first year, she said.

“When faced with more paperwork, meetings and red tape, it takes away from the time staff have to devote to creating the unique environments needed to support the student when they are present,” Darby told The Oregonian/OregonLive. She said for her, the system is “taking steps backwards in inclusion and equality.”

Reed Scott-Schwalbach, president of the Oregon Education Association, said she’s heard Darby’s concerns echoed statewide. Her union is preparing to propose a “technical fix” that would allow parents and teachers to agree to a yearly plan, which could then be revisited when necessary, she said.

Meanwhile, paraprofessionals charged with providing one-on-one aid to students with disabilities are typically low-paid and their jobs can be intense, demanding and emotional.

“I have a student that I work with who really struggles to be in the school building,” said a paraprofessional at an elementary school in the Tigard-Tualatin School District who asked not to be named to keep the student’s identity private.

Tigard-Tualatin is noted for having almost no students on short day schedules.

“He speaks, but he struggles with verbal communication, especially when he is feeling overwhelmed and frustrated,” the paraprofessional said. “I am on alert every day for whether he will slam his head into me.”

She says the two of them have built a mutual understanding, and she can tell that he wishes he could tell her exactly what he needs, instead of being frustrated and getting physical. But sometimes, despite their best mutual efforts, her student shuts down, she said, and she’ll find him in the corner of the resource room, unresponsive to the world around him.

“These kids deserve to be in our schools, 100%,” she said. “But they need to be supported in a way that our schools can’t, and that is so unfair.”

‘I need him back to school, full-time’

For some families, Senate Bill 819 has made a meaningful difference.

In spring 2023, Jenna Rodgers wrote an anguished email to the principal of Silver Rail Elementary in Bend after her son was put on reduced school hours following regular meltdowns and attempts to flee from kindergarten. He was put into a special program for children with complex needs for a single hour each day, riding a bus to meet one-on-one with a teacher. His mother said he spent most of his spare time coloring, lonely and uncertain.

“(He) is doing very well, but him only attending an hour a day makes it impossible for me to work, so we have already received a three-day notice for unpaid rent,” Rodgers wrote then. “Plus, he needs regular school. He needs to be around peers. I need him back to school full time within five days.”

Her son never did get back to school full-time in Bend. But last summer, Rodgers moved in with relatives near Salem and in the fall of 2023, he started school full-time at Salem Heights Elementary, in the Salem- Keizer district. His shyness is evaporating, his mother said, and he’s learning to read.

“He’s doing wonderful,” Rodgers said. “He gets nice notes home from his teacher every day.”

Scott Maben, a spokesperson for the Bend-LaPine School District, said that the district had “adjusted its practices to fully comply with SB 819. Even before this law was in effect, the district rarely applied abbreviated days for students, and now it’s even less common.”

Annette Cooper’s neurodiverse son was put into an “in-home placement” by the Redmond School District in December of 2022, his mother said, and has yet to go back to a school building. He was adopted at birth and has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, which can cause a wide range of physical and cognitive impairments.

Cooper said the last straw was when, as a reward for good participation, a principal at his old school let her teenage son play a game. But his behavior plan specified that games were a trigger for him, his mother said, and in his resultant furor and anger over the outcome, he vandalized a classroom.

A series of tutors sent to their home by the school district did not work out. Her son, who is easily overwhelmed and was diagnosed with autism in November 2023, cursed at them, raising safety concerns even though his parents have been present for all the sessions, Cooper said.

The family spent this past school year negotiating to get him admitted to Redmond Proficiency Academy, a charter school that emphasizes letting students move through courses at their own pace. He was set to begin last week, and they are — for the first time in almost two years — optimistic, Cooper said.

“(The new law) has played a very big part in helping Alex be placed,” she said. “I think without it, he would still be at home. We’ve made sure (the law) was mentioned in every meeting, in every part of our mediation with the school district.”

Kerry Desmarais, the director of Secondary Special Education at the Redmond School District, said the district has its “processes in place for abiding by Senate Bill 819, as directed by the Oregon Department of Education,” and that in the last year, the district had put no students onto shortened schedules.

The Cooper family’s experience gets to the core of the new law, said Gelser Blouin. For the law to work, she said, parents need to “speak up to enforce it. Some people are still very uncomfortable doing that.”

Case in point: The state investigated just seven parent-driven complaints about shortened school days in the 2023-24 school year. Only one complaint resulted in serious repercussions, with the state mandating that the district provide 200 hours of make-up instruction.

In five of the complaints, the agency ordered that students return to full day school immediately, Wetherell said. In no case has any school district lost state funding.

Not every school district has a history of putting students on short school days, but some districts have made more liberal use of the practice, the state’s data shows.

Under the new law, school districts are still permitted to suspend or expel students who are violent towards other students or employees, Gelser Blouin noted.

“Districts have the ability to act immediately if there is a significant danger,” she said. “There is due process in there. But it can’t just be that the kid has behaviors related to their disabilities that are disruptive or annoying.”

When Portland Public Schools reopens, Brenna Legaard’s son will start over at a different high school. He won’t be full-time, his mother said, but will be back for a few hours each day as they see if he can ramp up.

She’s not certain it will work. The family tried a summer school program this year and he tipped over chairs and made a run for it, she said.

Legaard makes a point to say that her family has had many supportive, warm, loving teachers in Portland Public Schools. She says she understands why some educators and administrators turn to chopped-off school days, given a system that doesn’t have all of the supports that students with behavior needs and the adults charged with helping them require.

Still, she said, being in school with peers is the goal for her son and for the hundreds of kids like him around Oregon. She’s optimistic, if uncertain, about what’s ahead.

“I have high hopes for what they are planning on doing in the fall. If they actually do it.”

© 2024 Advance Local Media LLC
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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