Lauren O’Connell Mahler of McAndrews Law Offices’ Wilmington, Delaware office recently successfully completed two due process hearings in which compensatory education and other relief was granted for children with disabilities

In the first case, over 250 hours of compensatory education was awarded for a period of approximately 2 years of inadequate programming and failures by the child’s school to provide required services. The hearing panel ordered compensatory education at a rate of $75 per hour, with the school being ordered to pay for these private services within 30 days, and any failure to make any such payment would result in the Delaware Department of Education withholding funding for the school until payments are made and documented. The school was further ordered to review and revise the child’s IEP to address absences due to illness, and to provide remedial education to its staff regarding their obligations to identify all children with disabilities. The panel found that the school’s record-keeping was inadequate, and determined that the Delaware Department of Education should conduct oversight of the school’s record-keeping until meaningful improvements were in place. Finally, the school was ordered to provide additional information to parents of children with disabilities concerning the educational rights of children so that those rights could be preserved and protected.

In the second case, compensatory education was ordered due to the school’s failure over a period of nearly two entire school years to provide a free appropriate public education to the child. The school was ordered to establish a trust fund for the parents to draw upon to obtain private compensatory education services for the student, at a rate consistent with payments to available tutors. Consequently, the hearing panel found that the school owed the child approximately two years’ worth of full school days of compensatory education.