By Kathleen Acuff

With the student’s parents and the school district holding their ground, court and special education hearings will soon decide how best to educate one autistic third-grader.

The next steps in the case of the Springer Elementary School student against whom the Los Altos School District brought a restraining order in November are a civil hearing in Santa Clara County Superior Court on Monday and two Special Education Hearing Office due-process hearings in January.

The district requested the restraining order after concluding that the student had become a danger to herself and others in her classroom. It requested a Special Education hearing, scheduled for Jan. 6, after being unable to come to an agreement with her parents about her Individual Education Program (IEP).

The temporary restraining order called for tutoring the student one-on-one in the small, pleasant group-work room next to the special resource teacher’s room at Springer. The student’s mother has likened the setting to “a jail.”

“It is required by law that we always have a student in the least restrictive environment, so that’s a responsibility we take very seriously,” said Charlene Luks, the district’s director of pupil services.

The student has been mainstreamed, accompanied by a shadow aide, since kindergarten. She attended Loyola Elementary School until the start of this school year, when she started third grade at Springer.

Her parents, Sam and Shifteh Samari, requested the second Special Education office hearing, scheduled for Jan. 8, to try to obtain “nothing more than the district providing services the law requires them to provide for our child.”

Mr. Samari said last week that “the issue is education.” He and Mrs. Samari are adamant that only personnel trained by the Lovaas Institute for Early Intervention, at the University of California at Los Angeles, provide the discrete trial therapy (DTT) program they say their younger daughter requires.

The child has received DTT at home since the age of three and a half, sometimes under the supervision of the Lovaas Institute, and sometimes under other supervision. None of her DTT home-care providers in that time were trained by the Lovaas Institute.

“The methodology developed by Lovaas, known as discrete trial, is one of several approaches found successful with autistic children, and we have used it with many of our autistic students,” Luks said.

Decisions about education and therapeutic intervention for a special education student are “made by consensus of the IEP team and … on an individual basis for each child,” she explained.

“If the members of the IEP team, which includes the parents, cannot reach an agreement, that is when mediation or due process may be necessary to resolve the disagreement,” Luks said. “The hearing officer then hears evidence and makes a decision as to what is an appropriate program of placement and services for the specific student. In (this district), many students with autistic spectrum disorder have been successfully educated in regular classrooms.”

Both state and federal laws require a school district to provide a customized “free appropriate public education” (FAPE) to each of its special education students. The FAPE must meet state educational standards as well as the requirements for special services that are part of each student’s IEP. The IEP must allow the student to be involved - and progress - in the mainstream curriculum and to participate in extracurricular activities, and it must prepare each student for eventual employment and independent living.

The U.S. Supreme Court determined in 1982 (Board of Education of the Hendrick Hudson Central School District v. Rowley) that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires an IEP to provide the student some educational benefit, but that it does not require school districts to provide special education students with the best education available or to provide instruction or services that maximize a student’s abilities.

Last fall, the district requested a Special Education office hearing when the Samaris disagreed with its recommendation for their daughter’s second-grade IEP. The hearing officer in that case concluded: “(T)he district has offered a FAPE, even if the parents prefer a different program or services and even if the parents’ preferred program or services would result in greater educational benefit.”