A Lighthouse Appears
In which we sail towards a gleam in the dark.
Sorrow Is Not My Name
—after Gwendolyn Brooks
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.
—for Walter Aikens
—Ross Gay
At the point when my essay was published in Slate in June, we had been struggling to find help for Ash for six long, terrible months. In that piece, I told only a fraction of the story of our maddening, inexplicable fight with Ash’s school district; honestly, I’m afraid writing it all out would lead some folks to question my veracity. It’s that outrageous. The upshot was that Ash was denied access to any education from the end of November through the end of the 2022-2023 school year, and we ended the year without any placement for her. In one of the wealthiest, best-resourced, most liberal school districts in America, no less.*
Sometime in mid-spring though, after the district had canceled a third meeting at the very last minute (they were obviously trying to delay past the end of the school year, so they could buy themselves the summer to figure things out), I remembered that I am a special education attorney and advocate, and I further remembered that I used to work for the U.S. Department of Education resolving special education complaints (among other things), and I got out my trusty laptop and I fired off complaints to the state (MD) and federal Departments of Education.
Did you know that it is entirely free to do this?
And that you do not need a lawyer?
And that if your complaint meets some basic requirements (recency, etc.), the state or federal government will investigate and - if they find violations - require the school district to fix the problem(s)?
All for free?
It’s true. (All you struggling parents out there, feel free to reach out to me if you want help filing a complaint.)
So, I filed my complaints, and one day later, the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) opened an investigation, and then a Very Senior Official from MSDE called me and said that she was taking my case, and then I sent her 189 pages of evidence, and then she sent a letter two hours later listing the allegations she was investigating based on my evidence, which far exceeded even what I had detailed in my original complaint.
And just like that, out of darkness, a bit of light appeared. And it felt good.
In the words of the immortal Taylor Swift:
I don't like your little games
Don't like your tilted stage
The role you made me play of the fool
No, I don't like you
…
But I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time
Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time
I got a list of names, and yours is in red, underlined
I check it once, then I check it twice, oh!
Ooh, look what you made me do
Look what you made me do
Look what you just made me do
Look what you just made me...
Ooh, look what you made me do
Look what you made me do
Look what you just made me do
Look what you just made me do
(Can you tell I have three daughters?)
In the wake of this letter, the district managed to finally keep a meeting it had scheduled, but then the incompetent special education case manager from Ash’s school (the school that failed to offer her any help all year) was not prepared for the meeting, so we came back a week later, and the district finally agreed to refer Ash to the central placement team that could place her in a therapeutic school. Phew!
Except, of course, through what I can only imagine was a mix of incompetence, understaffing, intransigence, and more incompetence, the district then dropped the ball again, and went totally silent on us, despite repeated inquiries from our lawyer for an update.
And then, on June 2, a month after we had finally met, the state Department of Education issued its findings letter, and we prevailed on every allegation. They set a mid-summer deadline for the district to place Ash and offer a full year’s worth of compensatory services. Hurray!
Hilariously (because you laugh when it is a better option than crying), the district STILL could not get itself together, and we did not meet until three days before the deadline, and we met for 2.5 hours, and then we had to reconvene because they did not bring the right people to the table, so we ended up having the meeting to decide placement the day before the deadline. Which meant that while - hallelujah - the district finally agreed to place Ash in a therapeutic school (more on that in a sec), they very much missed the deadline on finalizing the placement and offering the compensatory services. Oops!
But. But. But. We finally got them to agree to a therapeutic placement! And - here’s the crazy part - two hours before we met with the district, I got a job! A really great one!
So, after eight months of pushing and fighting and searching and struggling and agonizing and hurting and waiting and waiting and waiting and incomprehensible bureaucratic madness (I could write a whole book on my job search process, which was also inexplicable and baffling and deeply upsetting), within a few hours on a random weekday in July, everything was fixed. Just like that. Amazing!
Also, in a twist that I will forever ponder, after all of that illegal, hostile, mind-blowing, destructive behavior from the district, month after month, as Ash suffered and spiraled and - extrovert that she is - missed her friends and her normal life terribly, the district placed her in a public therapeutic school that does not cost them a dime.
Yep. That’s right. And they knew we were open to that placement because we told them back in the winter that we would consider it. Which means that all of that illegal, hostile, mind-blowing, destructive behavior was not meant to protect the district from having to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a private school. It was just meant to…actually, I have no idea what it was meant to do. Maybe nothing. Maybe it was part of their bigger campaign, which I’ve heard about through the grapevine, to respond to the child mental health crisis by pulling the ladders up and locking the doors and refusing to expand therapeutic options for the tide of kids who need them. I do not know, and I am sure it will forever be a mystery.
Now, because I strive to be fair, I will say this: As we met in July with the district’s central office team, aside from giggling to myself as the supervisors tore the incompetent special education case manager’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) for Ash apart line by line (I shouldn’t laugh, but so much of this nightmare arose from her inability or unwillingness to help Ash that I am past caring), I did get a glimpse, finally, of what the situation might have looked like from the perspective of some of the central office special education staff. On paper, Ash had only had an IEP since August 2022. She had a less intensive plan, called a 504 Plan, in place before that, but it does not really count as a full special education plan, so it likely was not on the central team’s radar. Then, two months into the school year, with barely any time to implement the IEP, Ash already needed a new placement, and we already were rejecting their suggested placement, and I can see how, without more context or background information, it might have seemed like we were trying to jump straight to a more intensive program without giving their recommended placement a chance.
This does not absolve them, of course. They refused to hear us out for so long that there is no excuse. And they allowed Ash to be excluded from school for months, all because they would not even meet to consider our reasonable arguments for why she needed a different kind of placement than the one they initially suggested. (A small moment of vindication did come during the latest meeting when one of the supervisors noted that the program they had originally suggested was really designed for kids who act out at school, and was therefore not a good fit for Ash, which is what I had been saying all along.) But they were not acting entirely unreasonably, and it gives me a small bit of peace to acknowledge that.
Now here is where I was hoping to end the essay - with everything tucked away neatly and on track for a better year. But, because our school district seems to be determined to make my actual head actually explode, of course the person responsible for delivering Ash’s file to the school she has been referred to (where she still needs to go through an intake process and be accepted), delivered a different student’s file to the school and then went away on vacation for two weeks and didn’t figure out her mistake until I emailed her repeatedly to ask what the heck was going on.
Hear that sound? It’s my head hitting the keyboard. Repeatedly.
But, the good news is that the Maryland Department of Education is not freaking playing around, and they are not at all happy that the district has blown past their deadlines, which means that there is a decent chance that even though it may come down to the wire, things will finally work out.
And so I finally feel a glimmer of hope building that come August 28th, the first day of school, I will be happily back at work, and Ash will be off to a new school, and Elise will be headed to 3rd grade at the 3-5 elementary school down the street from my house (which is a mixed blessing because it’s the same school that excluded Ash this past year), and Vee will be off to high school (!!!!) at the highly competitive Communication Arts (and social justice!) magnet program at our neighborhood high school. And in the interim the world seems to be sliding back towards serenity, or at least glimpses of serenity, or at least a feeling of regrowing and re-blooming hope. And I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.
*Because I am reasonable and fair-minded, I will not name the district, since they cannot tell their side of the story. I will only say that the district shares a name with a lowland Scottish clan, a surprising number of football players (both American football and real football), and a supervillain from a long-running animated series.
And she persisted. You take my breath away.