Children are our priority. Ensuring their needs are met is our goal.
The hearing officer’s confirmation letter and her notice of pre-hearing letter fall on the benign side, with a few exceptions:
Metadata lists them as being associated with the U.S. Army.
They included incorrect information related to the parents.
They granted the LEA’s lawyer control of the conference platform.
Can a hearing officer force a family to meet in person, rather than virtually, even though the family and/or witnesses fall into the category of at-risk?
Can their training help parents prepare for due process?
These are just a few of the questions running through my mind when I submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) for “all of the training materials that VDOE provides to hearing officers, as well anything else related to their training.”
Does the Following Smell Neutral?
Virginia Hearing Officer Morgan Brooke-Devlin worked in a Blankingship & Keith office during a due process hearing for which she was assigned to be the hearing officer.
In addition to its lawyers being bcc’d on e-mails from teachers to students, Blankingship & Keith lawyers, among other things, represent school divisions during due process hearings.
Virginia Hearing Officer Frank Aschmann thought it appropriate to judge the skin color of a parent’s advocate, and include his judgement of his interpretation of her appearance in his due process decision.
Why?
It reads like a report modeled on a deflated balloon. “Full” isn’t a word to associate with it.
At this point in the game, states across the nation have been facing this topic since Spring 2020. Fingers crossed that a) more research is being done and b) that any related charges are minimal (or waived).
The report will be presented live. A dedicated YouTube link will be made available for public viewing of the live event. (link to come)
It includes information about IEP development, too, such as Lourrie Duddridge correcting the use of the PLOP page for present levels instead of a place used to document meeting minutes.
At about the 1:54:56 time mark, Lourrie Duddridge states: “We’ve been looking at a lot of present level of performance pages (PLOPS) and we need to just remind everybody that those documents are really for documenting the student’s present level of performance. How are they doing in their educational environment and what we propose as a team, and that those statements are written in objective measurable terms, and that we’re using appropriate data on those pages. What the page is not for is summaries of what happened–minutes of the meeting. And we’re seeing a lot of that on our present level of performance pages and what it does is clutter the IEP, and then we get present level of performance pages that are 20 pages long, because we have documented so much stuff that really isn’t relevant to the proposal itself.”
In a recent meeting, the parents and their advocate brought the bccing practice to the attention of a due process hearing officer.
The hearing officer, in turn, asked Allen, who was attending the meeting, too:
“What’s your authority Mr. Allen?”