Pasadena Unified has reached a settlement that will spur changes to its special education programs for students with behavioral and mental health disabilities.
A key feature of the settlement includes a comprehensive report from an independent expert who will audit the school’s existing programs and recommend, then oversee changes for the next five years to ensure they are made according to the settlement’s terms.
The agreement, which the district entered into voluntarily without admitting any liability or guilt, is the result of a 2016 class action lawsuit from Disability Rights California, a nonprofit advocacy group.
The group argued students with behavioral and mental health disabilities could be educated alongside their neurotypical peers if the right systems were in place. The programs Pasadena Unified offered, they alleged in the lawsuit, only exacerbated students’ symptoms, preventing them from being educated with their peers on normal campuses.
District officials and their lawyers dispute the characterization of the services provided by schools.
Still, the district and the litigants “have the same common vision for children,” Chief Academic Officer Elizabeth Blanco said in an interview.
“The reason we were able to settle this case and come to a common agreement is because we both know this about one another,” she said.
Isolation rooms and physical restraints
The complaint, filed in 2016, largely focuses on the district’s Focus Point Academy, which is its most specialized program for students with mental and behavioral disabilities.
According to the lawsuit, the district’s Focus Point campus in Altadena regularly used a padded “isolation room” — which it says the district called “boring rooms” — where they were “frequently” bound by physical restraints to discipline students, it says.
Furthermore, it argues the academic programs offered at Focus Point weren’t rigorous, alleging students’ achievement levels fell when they were moved to the specialized campus.
According to district officials, Focus Point is supposed to be a temporary way station for troubled students, an opportunity to stabilize before transitioning back to a typical campus full-time. But, the lawsuit alleges, this rarely happens. Instead, students get stuck at the specialized campus to their detriment.
“The isolation of students at Focus Point severely diminishes their educational opportunity,” it says, adding that students are denied opportunities to “develop appropriate social skills.” Students become “stigmatized,” it alleges, leading students to assume “they are incapable or unworthy of attending their neighborhood schools with their nondisabled peers.”
All of this impacts students’ behavior, creating a pattern where even the students who leave Focus Point are perpetually cycling back into the program because it doesn’t give them the tools they need to function in a normal classroom environment, the lawsuit says.
Because the district settled, the lawsuit was never litigated and the veracity of these claims were never tested in court.
Blanco, who helped design the program before leaving the district and then returning years later, believes the complaint is “misrepresenting what is happening” at Focus Point now. She couldn’t say if the suit misrepresented campus practices at the time the suit was filed because she wasn’t working for the district.
A spokeswoman for the district pointed to Pasadena Unified’s new mental health program, enacted over the past two years and developed in partnership with the University of Southern California. It provides mental health services for students across the district, coupled with other programs that provide a “holistic approach” to students’ mental health.
It’s available to all students, but services are increased for students with special needs who work with a team of administrators, teachers, counselors, therapists and family members that help determine what the student should be doing in school.
It’s part of a “continuum of care” required by the state, she said. Focus Point is on the furthest, most controlled end of that continuum.
District’s response
Blanco doesn’t believe the isolation, or “boring rooms,” were used to punish students.
“Nobody is in a room alone, and nobody should be in a padded room,” she said, suggesting that students who went into the space made the decision for themselves. “We would never leave children in a room without an adult.”
She referred to the spaces as “reboot rooms” and said they were intended for students to “self-regulate when they’re upset.” It was “designed so they can self-soothe and go to a quieter setting, or as an alternative to suspension.”
Candis Bowles, who was the lead attorney on this case for Disability Rights California, stood by the lawsuit’s description of the rooms, saying these “were the experiences of our clients.”
Bowles directly represented six students in the suit in which they alleged “academic instruction is ‘dumbed down.’” At Focus Point, teachers worked in “multigrade classrooms” where high school freshman, seniors, sophomores and juniors were all taught the same lessons, the lawsuit alleges. It was the same setup for middle schoolers.
Worse, it says, the school had a dearth of extracurricular activities.
“Students at Focus Point cannot take physical education classes,” the lawsuit alleges. “There are no intramural athletics or student sports teams. … There is no auditorium, no music or band classes or clubs, and no drama or dance program.”
Marlon Wadlington, a lawyer for the district, declined to get into the specifics of the allegations because parts of the settlement are still being ironed out, specifically, the exact terms of what will change about the district’s special education programs.
“The great thing about America is that everybody has the ability to put their allegations or complaints in a lawsuit,” he said in an interview. “The district’s position is that those allegations aren’t true until there’s a trial before a judge or a jury that rules on those allegations.”
Pasadena Unified entered into the agreement “because it’s in the best interest of the district and its students,” he said. The settlement was heavily mediated “for years,” he said. “The district has agreed to explore alternative methods of addressing the needs of its special education students.”
An independent expert
Per the settlment, the district has already hired Lauren Katzman, an independent consultant with Urban Collective who specializes in these types of projects. She will audit the district’s existing programs and provide recommendations for changes.
A draft of her report is already in the works, according to Lewis Bossing, senior staff attorney for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, which was also involved in the suit.
The report will be based on interviews with parents, students and district staff. Katzman’s suggestions will all be aimed at “increasing inclusive education” alongside their neurotypical peers, “improved academic outcomes” and “improved social emotional learning, including decreases in rates of suspension, expulsion, restraint, and seclusion/time outs,” according to the settlement.
Her initial recommendations will go to the district and the plaintiffs, who will agree which will be implemented with monthly check-in meetings over the next five years under Katzman’s consistent watch and guidance, Bossing said in an interview. He hoped to see it by the end of the year.
While he disputed Blanco’s assertion things had changed in the district’s special education services throughout the past few years — saying: “I haven’t seen any evidence to indicate that Pasadena is doing a better job” and “it takes a while to turn things around” — he’s still confident that the program will ultimately be a success.
“We know with the right kind of data gathering and analysis” interventions can be developed to address “virtually every child, allowing them to be served in a general education setting.”
