The school district thinks they are offering FAPE to my kids & says that I am refusing it. Fuck them.

The school district just sent me a formal letter saying I was refusing FAPE (Free and appropriate public education) for my 12 year old disabled son Charlie. Below is my response tonight so far (I just got the letter in an email after I got the kids in to bed). But first here’s the communication I got from them:

This nonsense has been going on since the “start of school”

I will post about the whole situation over the past two weeks when I get my computer back from my older son (who borrowed it for the first few weeks of college!)

The quick summary is that most kids with disabilities (with IEPs or 504 plans) in this country are NOT being supported in any way by the public school system during this pandemic – my kids are just one instance of this. Every mother of disabled kids (especially those who are primary breadwinners for their family – as I am) are f’ing pulling their hair out at this point.

In our case the Portland Public School district (and their teachers and administrators – in Portland, Oregon) seems completely obsessed with making sure they send the right communications to protect themselves from liability for not providing FAPE and not at all concerned with actually trying to provide FAPE for my children.

It’s almost like the staff got training (or coaching) in “Tips for denying FAPE to SPED kids in a way that maintains our funding for that child (without incurring any correlated expenses during the pandemic.)”

It’s disgusting.

Tamara Rubin

My response letter tonight (in three screenshots from my phone since i don’t have my computer.)

Continue reading below the images…

Instead… some suggested appropriate accommodations given the pandemic:

Send us free online access to an educationally appropriate audio book resource (we read books on our iPhones & iPads, so something that works with that would be good.) (Or a gift card to pay for the service we already know how to access.)
Send us free access to educationally appropriate online music streaming. Really a subscription to Apple Music for the year would be perfect with that and that would just be about $120 I think. The kids have been doing so much learning through music recently! (History, geography, language and more can be taught through the appropriate musical resources.)
Send us free access to educationally appropriate Apps and games. This could be done with a gift card to the App Store or something similar. The kids played Mad Libs yesterday (free version) and had a blast learning about the English language for hours (without even realizing they were learning!)
Send our vouchers for food for families on the free lunch program. They promised us this at the end of last year and we never received it.
Give my son a laptop. While they may have offered this I missed the memo. My 10th grader has a school laptop but my younger kid does not. To my knowledge no device was offered to my 6th grader at all. These should be distributed WITH protective carrying cases as well.
Get families a voucher for school supplies and art supplies- maybe $200 or $300? We’ve probably spent $150 so far this year already: glue, markers, pencils, paper, notebooks, erasers, paint, a way to keep the stuff organized… art supplies are KEY for Charlie’s learning process.
Subscriptions to Master Class and Amazon educational channels (& programs like “lumosity”) would be helpful too.
Get parents LISTS of software and online learning programs (and educational games and apps) they may want to choose from (regardless of availability of funding!)

Those are just some ideas off the top of my head. Total cost of all that … maybe $500 or $1,000 – instead of fucking with us and harassing us with emails implying we are not being reasonable… and formal district forms asserting we are denying FAPE that they insist they are offering. I’m so sick of this fight!