District Wins: Day School Placement, Not Residential, Required to Provide FAPE

What Happened

Student was a 14-year-old eligible for special education under the category of other health impairment, based on a diagnosis of mood disorder, not otherwise specified. Since age seven, Student had lived almost continuously in residential treatment centers — first placed there by the Department of Children and Family Services because of violent and threatening behaviors at home, not for educational reasons. Throughout those years, multiple school districts educated Student in non-public day schools on the residential campuses, and no IEP team had ever concluded that residential placement was necessary for Student to receive an appropriate education. When the Department of Children and Family Services stopped funding Student's residential placement in late 2012, Parent sought to have Burbank Unified School District take over that funding by declaring the residential placement an educational necessity.

Parent requested a comprehensive assessment and argued that Student required placement at a residential treatment facility to address his social, emotional, and behavioral needs as part of his special education program. The District conducted a thorough multi-disciplinary assessment in February 2013 and convened an IEP on March 1, 2013. The District found Student eligible for special education and offered full-time specialized academic instruction at Five Acres, a non-public day school, along with counseling, a behavior support plan, accommodations, and transition services. Parent agreed with the eligibility finding and most of the IEP, but disagreed that residential placement was unnecessary. Parent enrolled Student at Forest Heights Lodge, a residential treatment center in Colorado, and filed for due process seeking reimbursement and an order requiring the District to fund that residential placement.

What the ALJ Found

The ALJ ruled entirely in favor of the District. The central finding was that Student's behavioral and emotional challenges in the classroom were consistently manageable in a day school setting and did not require a residential placement for Student to obtain an educational benefit from his IEP. Daily classroom behavior records from Canyon View showed Student earned full or near-full behavior points on 92 percent of school days. His significant behavioral incidents occurred primarily in the residential cottages — not in the classroom — and those cottage incidents did not spill over into his school performance. Because Student could access and benefit from his education in a day school, the far more restrictive residential placement was not required under the law.

The ALJ also rejected the Parent's expert (Dr. McRoberts), who argued that Student needed residential therapy to manage anxiety and prevent behavioral blowups at home. The ALJ noted that the expert himself acknowledged it was not the school district's responsibility to help Student do better at home. The IDEA requires districts to address learning-related needs, not to treat medical, social, or emotional problems that exist apart from the learning process. Even the expert found Five Acres to be a strong program and could not identify any educational need that Five Acres could not address. The ALJ further found that District's assessment, while imperfect in minor respects (such as not obtaining one rating scale from a residential caregiver), was overall appropriate and comprehensive, and that Parent had not requested an independent educational evaluation at public expense or provided contrary assessment data to the IEP team.

What Was Ordered

1. All of Student's claims for relief were denied.
2. The District was not required to fund or reimburse residential placement at Forest Heights Lodge or any other residential treatment center.
3. The District prevailed on all issues.

Why This Matters for Parents

1. A district is not required to pay for residential placement just because a child's home behaviors are severe. Under the law, a school district's responsibility is limited to addressing the educational impact of a disability. If a child can access and benefit from education in a day school setting, the district does not have to fund a residential program — even if that residential setting would produce better overall outcomes or is necessary for the child to function safely at home.

2. The history of who funded and why a residential placement was made matters enormously. In this case, every prior residential placement was made and paid for by child welfare services because of home behaviors — not by any IEP team for educational reasons. That history strongly supported the district's position that residential placement was not an educational necessity.

3. Expert opinions must be tied to the child's educational needs at the time of the IEP. The parent's expert evaluated Student six months after the IEP and in a new setting, without interviewing the teachers and counselors who knew Student at the time. The ALJ gave that expert's opinions less weight as a result. If you are going to challenge an IEP with an independent expert, make sure that expert reviews contemporaneous records and focuses on what the child needed at the time the IEP was written.

4. If you disagree with the district's assessment, request an independent educational evaluation (IEE) promptly. In this case, Parent did not request an IEE at public expense and did not submit contrary assessment data to the IEP team. That made it harder to challenge the district's conclusions about Student's unique needs. Requesting an IEE early in the process is one of the most important tools available to parents who believe a district's evaluation missed something.