Inadequate Behavior Plan Denied Student FAPE for Four Weeks at School Start

What Happened

Student is a seven-year-old boy with significant physical disabilities, including spina bifida, hydrocephalus, and Arnold-Chiari malformation, who was eligible for special education under the category of other health impairment. During the 2013-2014 school year, Student was placed in a special day preschool class where he exhibited a range of challenging behaviors: hitting, kicking, head butting, spitting, yelling, and using profanity. The district's psychologist conducted a functional behavior assessment and, in February 2014, the IEP team developed a behavior intervention plan based on those findings. However, the plan focused only on yelling — even though the assessment data showed Student hit people 13 times and yelled 19 times during the observation period, making the two behaviors nearly equally frequent.

For the 2014-2015 school year, the IEP team moved Student into a general education transitional kindergarten class. Almost immediately, Student's behaviors escalated significantly. Over a series of incidents in August and September 2014, Student screamed, hit teachers and aides, banged his head against walls, and refused to follow instructions — losing hours of instructional time on multiple days. He was suspended twice. Parent pulled Student from school on September 11, 2014, believing the district could not provide appropriate behavioral supports, and Student did not return until February 2016. Parent filed a due process complaint in December 2015 arguing that the district's behavior intervention plan was inadequate, that staff had violated Student's dignity, and that the district failed to file for due process after the August 2014 IEP meeting when Parent disagreed with the district's proposed direction.

What the District Did Wrong

The ALJ found that the February 2014 behavior intervention plan was procedurally deficient in ways that ultimately denied Student a FAPE from August 13 to September 10, 2014. The plan identified yelling as the only target behavior, even though district staff had documented hitting, kicking, head butting, spitting, and profanity — behaviors that were nearly as frequent as yelling. The plan also failed to identify what triggered Student's behaviors (antecedents), what functions the behaviors served (such as escaping non-preferred tasks), appropriate replacement behaviors, or consequence strategies. Student's expert, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, explained that without understanding the function of a behavior, interventions can actually make things worse — for example, if a student yells to escape a task and the response is timeout, the timeout rewards the yelling by granting the escape the student wanted. The district offered no expert testimony to contradict these findings.

When Student transitioned to a more demanding general education setting in August 2014, the plan's gaps became critical. Because it lacked the contextual information needed to address the full range of Student's behaviors, staff were left without effective tools, and Student lost significant instructional time during the first four weeks of school.

What Was Ordered

1. District must provide a total of 12 hours of services from a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, sourced from Autism Partnership or another non-public agency the district contracts with.
2. Six of those hours must be used, no later than 10 school days after the start of the 2016-2017 school year, to train all teachers, aides, and substitutes working with Student on how to consistently implement Student's IEP and to train staff to collect behavioral data for 30 school days.
3. Four hours must be used for the Board Certified Behavior Analyst to analyze the collected behavioral data and make recommendations to the IEP team about whether a behavior intervention plan is needed.
4. Two hours must be used for the Board Certified Behavior Analyst to attend Student's IEP team meeting to discuss findings and help develop effective behavioral strategies.
5. Unused hours do not expire as long as Student remains enrolled in the district — unless unexcused absences make implementation impossible, in which case any unused hours expire at the end of the 2016-2017 school year.
6. All other requests for relief — including a full-time behavioral aide, parent training, and compensatory education for time Student was not in school — were denied.

Why This Matters for Parents

1. A behavior plan that ignores documented behaviors is legally deficient. If your child's functional behavior assessment identifies multiple challenging behaviors but the resulting behavior intervention plan only addresses one of them, that plan is incomplete. Parents can and should ask at the IEP meeting why specific behaviors were excluded and request that the plan address all behaviors that are affecting the child's education.

2. A behavior plan must identify the function of the behavior, not just the behavior itself. California law and federal special education law require that behavior plans be grounded in an understanding of why a student behaves a certain way — to escape a task, get attention, obtain something, or for self-stimulation. A plan that skips this step may actually reinforce the behaviors it is trying to reduce. Parents can ask: "What function does this behavior serve, and how does our plan account for that?"

3. Switching to a more demanding placement without updating the behavior plan can create a FAPE violation. When Student moved from a special day class to a general education classroom, the existing behavior plan — already inadequate — was entirely unprepared for the new environment. Any time a significant placement change is made, parents should request a review and update of any behavior intervention plan to ensure it fits the new setting.

4. Districts are not automatically required to file for due process every time a parent disagrees at an IEP meeting. The ALJ found that the August 2014 IEP meeting was incomplete and that no formal FAPE offer had been made — meaning the district had no obligation to initiate due process. A disagreement during discussion is different from a parent rejecting a completed, formal offer. Parents should understand that a district's obligation to file for due process is triggered only when it has made a specific FAPE offer and the parent refuses consent to a component the district believes is necessary.