Education

Bixby schools fight parents of special-needs children

October 22, 2024

Ray Carter

In the past year, a group of parents in the Bixby Public Schools district whose children have Down syndrome or autism have fought for their children’s rights to access a regular classroom setting as allowed by federal law.

But they say Bixby school officials have steadfastly opposed those efforts, despite years of research showing that children with disabilities benefit from inclusion in a traditional classroom with little or no downside to their typically developing peers.

An investigation by the Oklahoma State Department of Education found that Bixby failed to properly document the decision-making process that resulted in children with special needs being segregated into separate classrooms for much of the school day.

And parents say the instruction given to their children often lacks serious academic goals. In particular, the reading materials used by Bixby appear to rely on the three-cueing method, a practice outlawed by state lawmakers this year because research has shown it does not teach students to read.

After parents filed a complaint with the state, they say Bixby officials responded by portraying Down syndrome children as disruptive and even violent to keep them out of traditional classrooms.

“You shouldn’t have to sell your house and move to a different school district just for your kids to get their rights that they deserve, to find a school that’s following the laws,” said Lauree Lee, whose daughter has Down syndrome.

Segregation common at Bixby

Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) law, children with special needs have the right to an education in the “least restrictive environment,” a phrase that means children should be incorporated into general-education classrooms with non-disabled peers as much as possible.

But at Bixby, the school often segregates children into special-education classrooms for much of the day.

The state goal is for 71.5 percent of students with disabilities to spend most of the school day in a regular classroom, but according to data publicly reported by school districts, only 52 percent of students with disabilities at Bixby were in the general classroom for that much time during the 2023 state budget year.

Similarly, the state goal is for 35 percent of children with disabilities to receive the majority of special education and services within a regular early childhood program, but only 2.5 percent of Bixby students do so.

The state goal is for fewer than 19.5 percent of children with disabilities to attend a separate special education class for early childhood programming, but 55 percent of students at Bixby are segregated in separate classes.

“It’s driving our children into these special-education classrooms without any typical-developing peers,” said Kristen Whitmer, whose seven-year-old daughter has Down syndrome. “It’s also putting them on curriculum that’s never going to give them an opportunity to even try to earn a regular diploma when they’re older.”

Parents say Bixby’s practices do not align with decades of research.

A 2016 report by Abt Associates reviewed more than 280 research studies conducted in 25 countries and found “consistent evidence that inclusive educational settings—those in which children with disabilities are educated alongside their non-disabled peers—can confer substantial short- and long-term benefits for children’s cognitive and social development.”

The report also found that research “suggests that in most cases, being educated alongside a student with a disability does not lead to negative consequences for non-disabled students.”

Bixby denies using bogus teaching method

Parents also say their children are not being taught basic literacy skills. It appears a major reason is because Bixby officials rely on a long-discredited teaching method known as “three cueing.”

In the three-cueing method, students are encouraged to guess words based on associated pictures and to memorize entire words rather than learn to sound them out.

APM Reports noted that three-cueing is a theory of instruction “that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked.” ExcelinEd in Action noted that the three-cueing system “can be boiled down to this: Teachers using this method instruct students to guess.”

This year, Oklahoma lawmakers passed Senate Bill 362, which stated that Oklahoma public-school teachers “shall be prohibited from using the three-cueing system model of teaching students to read” starting in the 2025-2026 school year.

At least 10 other states have banned the use of the three-cueing system.

A Bixby spokesperson said the “three-cueing method is not part of our instructional practice at Bixby Public Schools in any capacity.”

However, school reading material provided by a parent appeared to contain clear elements of the three-cueing method.

Parents say school officials also lack ambition when setting their children’s literacy goals.

“Last year, second year in kindergarten, she still had this goal of ‘shall identify her letters,’” Whitmer said. “And I’m like, ‘Guys, you’ve been working on this since she was three. She knows her letters. She also knows her letter sounds, her blended sounds, her digraphs, and also lots of sight words.’ So last November, almost a year ago, I was like, ‘Move on. Please give her a new reading goal. She knows this.’ And so the first reading goal that they were willing to do that was a step beyond the letters was ‘Adeline will learn 15 sight words in the next 12 months.’ And I said, ‘That’s not appropriately ambitious.’”

Today, Whitmer is having to teach her daughter more advanced reading instruction at home because the child isn’t receiving that instruction at school.

Lee’s daughter is currently in sixth grade and has been at Bixby since the fourth grade. Lee said she has seen little academic growth. The schoolwork assigned to the girl in sixth grade is little different from the material received two years ago.

“We haven’t really seen much progress, honestly,” Lee said. “So that was a big red flag.”

State data for the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent available, show that just 8.4 percent to 18.75 percent of Bixby students on an individualized education program (IEP) tested proficient in reading at six of seven school sites. Students on an IEP include those with everything from dyslexia to Down syndrome to autism and more.

Lee said there was little obvious change in many academic goals included in her daughter’s IEP from one year to the next.

“They’re just not very ambitious,” Lee said, “and we just think she’s capable of more.”

Even when Bixby officials agreed to allow students to attend some general-education classes, such as science, parents found that was no guarantee their child would receive instruction.

“At parent-teacher conferences, I was asking the gen-ed teacher, ‘How is Adeline doing during that time?” And she goes, ‘Oh, I don’t really teach her. That’s a SPED teacher’s job,’” Whitmer recalled. “So Adeline was physically present, but the general education teacher did not view it as her responsibility to even try to educate her. And all of us have had similar comments, maybe not quite so blunt.”

Parents file complaint, face backlash

Numerous parents of special-needs children sought to have their kids incorporated into traditional classrooms for a larger share of the school day, but Bixby school officials refused.

Eventually, nine families filed a complaint with the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) in May. Eight of the families have children with Down syndrome and one has a child with autism.

The complaint stated that officials at the Bixby school district had “systematically placed students with an Intellectual Disability or higher need Autism in a segregated setting without maximizing supplementary aides and services (or even trying them at all) in the Least Restrictive Environment.”

The complaint also stated that Bixby officials “repeatedly told parents that they don’t consent to recording meetings and would end the meeting if they were recorded.”

Under Oklahoma law, parents can record any conversation they participate in.

When the agency issued its decision on July 22, Oklahoma State Department of Education officials noted, “Districts should not place students in a more restrictive setting based on behavior unless the behavior is so disruptive that no amount of supplementary aids and services would allow him to be satisfactorily educated in a general education setting …”

The agency found Bixby officials had not produced “sufficient documentation regarding the meaning of the evaluation data and discussion of placement options that the District considered if students could be successful in the general education classroom with the full range of supports before considering more restrictive placements along the continuum.”

As a result, “The District is out of compliance based on the documentation of the procedural process.”

After OSDE issued its decision, officials at Bixby were required to meet with parents to discuss their children’s individualized education programs.

Prior to the complaint, Whitmer said Bixby officials raved about their children.

“All of our children, they would give us these great reviews,” Whitmer said. “‘They’re so sweet.’ ‘They’re doing so well.’ ‘They don’t have behavior issues.’ They would just glow about our kids.”

But that changed after parents demanded their children receive a better education.

“They started painting our children to be a monster,” Whitmer said.

When Whitmer met with the IEP team after filing the state complaint, she said Bixby officials came with a 14-page document outlining her daughter’s alleged bad behavior, “trying to paint this picture of why she couldn’t be in gen ed.”

“Literally, only one behavior in that whole 14 pages was I like, ‘That was noteworthy,’” Whitmer said.

And that behavior occurred on only one occasion.

The other alleged problem behaviors included things like not saying “Hi,” not making eye contact at times, and lying on the floor instead of sitting on the floor.

Katy Hough, whose son has Down syndrome, had a similar experience.

When she was given her son’s IEP draft after filing the state complaint, Hough said school officials “filled it with all of this stuff that had never been in there before about how my son was aggressive, and basically saying that he cannot learn in the general-education classroom in certain subjects.”

“The thing that got me was that they were trying to say that his behavior was such that he couldn’t be included,” Hough said. “And, I know you don’t know my son, but he’s the sweetest little thing. He’s a little bossy sometimes, but he’s so sweet, so kind. And, in general, most kids with Down syndrome are sweet kids.”

During the meeting, Hough recalled telling Bixby officials, “No one has ever said before that you have any problems with his behavior, but all of a sudden now you do.”

Bixby gets extra money for special-education kids, but parents do not see benefit

Under Oklahoma law, public schools receive additional funding for each student who has a diagnosed learning challenge. State funding can be bumped by thousands of dollars per student, depending on a child’s diagnosis.

How is that money being used to benefit the students that generate the extra funding? Parents say there is no clear answer.

“That’s been a lot of our questions,” Whitmer said. “Where is all of this money going?”

During a recent presentation, Marguerite Roza, research professor and director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said many schools nationwide spend money boosting special-education staff numbers, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into better outcomes.

“One of the most fascinating findings we’ve come across is diseconomies of scale,” Roza said. “So basically, larger districts tend to spend more per special-ed student, meaning that there are no efficiencies gained by having more students. We often think in special education, smaller districts are at a disadvantage because they only will have one of a type of a student, or two or three of a type of student, and so you end up investing in a special-ed teacher for a smaller number of kids. But we’re actually finding that the cost structure is higher in the larger districts.”

When Edunomics researchers examined National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) reading scores, they found that staff-heavy school programs “weren’t correlated with higher reading outcomes” for students with special needs.

“Sometimes, as we’ve been looking around across the country, the inputs—meaning the staffing counts—are treated as the outcome,” Roza said. “Like, ‘We are trying to improve our special-ed programs; we have hired this many more specialists.’ That’s not the outcome. Of course, that’s an input. We need to then check to see if this hiring is actually delivering value for students.”

Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller said the school has worked to address the concerns raised by the parents.

“At Bixby Schools, every student matters, especially those in special education,” Miller said. “We take every parent’s concerns to heart because inclusion is at the core of our district’s values.”

Bixby parents face uncertain future for their children

Hough noted there are college programs that cater to individuals with various disabilities and special needs, but students must often have a certain level of education to attend those programs.

She fears the path Bixby officials have placed her son on in elementary school, and the children of similar families across the district, makes it extremely unlikely those youth will be able to attend one of those programs after high school.

“We would like for him to grow up and hopefully have a diploma and then go to one of the 300 college programs that are in the United States for people with intellectual disability to learn how to live independently and have meaningful employment and relationships and get married if he would like to,” Hough said. “But I feel like the path they have him on … I don’t think that aligns with our goals for him. It’s one of the things that makes us really sad.”