Jose de Wit
SUN Staff Writer
The Española School District is seeking a replacement for the administrator it hired in 2006 to clean up its embattled special education department.
Special Education Director Pat Lopez announced her resignation last month in order to spend time with her mother, who was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis earlier this year. Her last day was Aug. 13, but Lopez said she will work sporadically with the District until September, while the District searches for a replacement.
Superintendent David Cockerham said assistant Special Education Director Alfred Garcia is overseeing the department until the District hires a new director. The District has so far heard from three applicants: Garcia, Bilingual Director Marilyn McBane and Bernice Life, a former District employee who worked for the Bernalillo School District last school year. Cockerham said he will start interviewing applicants this week.
“It was a difficult decision. I really, really love my job here,” a tearful Lopez said. “But if my mom dies, and I didn’t do everything I could to be with her, knowing I could be there for her, I’d never be able to forgive myself.”
Lopez did not hesitate when asked to cite the biggest accomplishment of her two-year tenure: clearing her department of numerous complaints and lawsuits from parents.
“My entire first year was working with attorneys on both sides of the table, doing evaluations, meeting with parents,” Lopez said.
The District hired a consultant during the summer of 2006 to start cleaning up the department just after, Cockerham said. Lopez came in and finished the job, he said.
When Lopez took charge during the summer of 2006, her department was understaffed and overworked, she said. At the start of the 2006-07 school year, the department was short 10 teachers and behind on 200 student evaluations.
Lopez said her department faced 17 complaints with the state Education Department and three unresolved federal lawsuits, all filed under the tenure of Lopez’s predecessor, Mary Agnes Martinez, and all resolved within a year.
Martinez was banned from further employment with the District as part of a settlement that netted her $100,000. The settlement resulted from a discrimination claim she filed accusing the District of unfairly demoting her while she was away on sick leave.
A total of six federal lawsuits alleging that Martinez failed to provide special education services as required by federal law were filed against the District between 2004 and 2006, a previous SUN report states.
Department spokeswoman Beverly Friedman confirmed 10 complaints were filed with the state during the 2005-06 school year. Friedman also said four complaints have been filed since Lopez arrived, two within months of her arrival and two in the past year. They have all been resolved, Friedman said. An online court records database shows no federal special education lawsuits have been filed against the District since April 2006.
“We managed to come to an agreement with all the parents,” Lopez said. “Most parents just want to be heard, to feel like their concerns are being listened to. As long as you keep options out there for them, everyone can walk away happy.”
According to one special education rights advocate, the reason complaints and lawsuits dropped after Lopez joined the District is simple: she knows how to do her job.
“What she brought with her was knowledge of regulations and procedures. That’s one thing about (Lopez): she does know the rules,” said Larry Fuller, the associate director of Parents Reaching Out, a non-profit special education advocacy group based in Albuquerque.
That expertise was for better and for worse, according to Fuller. On one hand, under Lopez the District began protecting itself from lawsuits by bringing lawyers to conferences with parents, a move Fuller called intimidation.
“Every time you bring a lawyer into a meeting like that, it stops communications.” Fuller said. “It shows you’re in it to protect yourself from liability. It’s a gate-keeping tactic, intimidation.”
On the other hand, there is no underestimating the fact that complaints and lawsuits all but stopped after Lopez’s arrival.
“Listen, before (Lopez), Española, in terms of special education, was the highest on the list of districts with potential for improvement. I have that list in my hands right now, and Española’s not on it,” Fuller said. “You know things are going right when complaints stop.”
Attorney Debra Poulin, who has represented parents in special education lawsuits against the District, said she has noticed the Special Education Department improve in that teachers and staff are more supported by administration in their work with children.
“Also, there’s not the same kind of environment of retaliation that was there under (Martinez),” Poulin said. “But you know, I’ve still heard a lot of the same kinds of complaints as before (Lopez arrived).”
Those complaints include many of the problems that led parents to file suits against the District in the past. For example, Poulin has heard complaints that students are not promptly evaluated for disabilities, she said.
That was the basis for the lawsuit filed in 2004 by the parents of Glen Martinez, a former District student with autism and Down’s syndrome. In the suit, Glen’s parents accused Mary Agnes Martinez and her predecessor, Robert Romero, of failing to test the student for autism. According to the complaint, District administrators had already classified Glen Martinez as a special education student on the basis of his Down’s syndrome, but repeatedly refused to test him for autism, saying “it didn’t matter” whether he was autistic. A diagnosis of autism would have made Glen Martinez eligible for additional specialized services.
That case was settled for $500,000 in October 2006, according to a federal court records database.
Another federal case settled during Lopez’s tenure was filed by the parents of student Marialisa Sanchez. The parents alleged in the suit that their daughter, a high school student with cerebral palsy, was unjustly segregated to a “D Level” classroom and was continually denied access to facilities and resources available to non-disabled students. The parents also claimed that Marialisa was sexually harassed and physically assaulted by classmates, and that the District failed to provide for her safety.
According to the complaint, a due process hearing officer in a Nov. 30, 2005, ruling said the facts of the case “hark back to a time when institutional warehousing of disabled persons was both commonplace and accepted.”
That case was settled for $250,000 in March 2007.
Lopez will leave with her department’s slate clean if the District finalizes a settlement with the family of Española Valley High School graduate Jeremy Montoya, who sued the District in March 2006 for allegedly failing to diagnose Montoya’s dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and provide him with special services.
“Due to intentional, retaliatory, and illegal acts and deliberate indifference by Española Public Schools and/or (Martinez),” Jeremy Montoya was denied a public education, his parents alleged in the suit.
Cockerham said the District agreed with Montoya’s parents on a roughly $200,000 settlement in late May, but a motion to close the case has not yet been filed, according to a federal courts database.
Lopez will not leave the District unscathed by controversy.
She came under fire last year, when an erroneous report to the state detailing how many special education therapists it employs inflated her department’s budget by $1 million. State officials threatened to make the District pay the $1 million back — though never acted on the threat — and when the report was corrected, it resulted in a $1 million shortfall in the special education’s budget for this school year.
Lopez pointed out that a large part of the error was due to the District’s charter schools, and particularly the Española Military Academy, “double-dipping” when they reported how many therapists they employed, but was quick to accept responsibility for the error.
Mary Agnes Martinez oversaw the Academy’s special education data reporting that caused the error, Lopez said.
“The buck stops with me,” Lopez said at the time.
Martinez did not return a call for comment.
Lopez also listed as accomplishments several new additions to her department.
One addition involves two former special education classrooms that were revamped as an observation room to diagnose autistic students.
The two rooms are divided by a glass panel. One one side, an evaluator diagnoses the student. On the other, teachers and therapists observe the pair and take notes, which are used to put together a diagnosis.
This summer, the District started a new “graduate transition program” that enrolls two special education students in a classroom at the Española seventh grade school’s former facility on Hunter Street. Special education students are eligible by law to receive services from the District until age 22.
“But after they’re 19, the high school is just not the place to be for them anymore,” Lopez said.
The new program will teach those older students life skills, Lopez said, and could eventually accommodate a maximum of eight students.