At the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year, KPS4Parents was contacted by a family in Paso Robles who had moved during the summer of 2009 from one side of town to another in order to be within the attendance area of a specific elementary school.  They did this because of the unsupportive, negative attitude they experienced at their child’s elementary school  during the 2008-2009 school year and research they did into which school sites within the District had supportive administrators and teachers who delivered more appropriate special education and related services to their students with special needs.

Unfortunately, after buying a new house and uprooting their entire family to achieve the goal of enrolling their child into a better school, they were informed that the school that had become their local neighborhood school was over-crowded and that their child would have to attend school at the campus they thought they’d left behind.  They were understandably devastated.

Rather than take the acrimonious route of trying to force their old school to comply with special education law and treat their child with respect and dignity, they had chosen a path they thought would allow them to leave the past behind them, call it water under the bridge, and move on with a new school.  Instead, they went to all that trouble only to be told that their child would be bussed right back to the horrible environment they had fled.

In the course of assisting this family, KPS4Parents submitted a request for public records under the California Public Records Act (“PRA”) to find out just how much thought has been devoted by the District to the issue of arbitrary forced transfers of students when school sites are impacted and special education students’ rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”) to placement in the least restrictive environment and in a setting that will meet the unique, individual needs of a child with disabilities.

The articles collected here follow the document trail created by our PRA request and provide for members of the public to comment on what we’ve found out.  If you have any updates, please either post comments to our articles or email us at info@kps4parents.org.