Unison Praise of ‘Specials’ Law

BY YOCHONON DONN – Hamodia

ALBANY – The new law that passed the New York state legislature last Thursday, empowering Orthodox parents of special-needs children in their fight for culturally-appropriate placements, was heralded by groups who lobbied for it and by parents as a breakthrough that would fundamentally ease their burden.

“This is something I have been dreaming of since the day I got into the Agudah. This is what I wanted. This was the goal,” Mrs. Leah Steinberg, director of Agudath Israel’s Special Education Affairs, for the past 12 years, told Hamodia. “I think that it’s going to be a breakthrough in our community; [I think] that it will be unbelievable.”

Rivka Moseson from Far Rockaway, whose 19-year-old son Yehuda Arye is developmentally delayed, said that the city had lately been placing more barriers on parents who wanted an Orthodox setting for their children. The law does not allow them to do that anymore.

“I was [so] happy that I started dancing,” Mrs. Moseson said, describing her reaction to the law. “It was the first hope that I had that things might get better legislatively.”

Assemblywoman Helene Weinstein (D-Brooklyn), whose help Agudath Israel said was indispensible in getting the bill passed, told Hamodia in an interview on Sunday that she was proudest of this law, which she considers one of the most significant accomplishments of her 32 years in the Assembly.

“This is why I drive back and forth to Albany every week,” Ms. Weinstein said. “A few times I had some really good victories; this is one of those.”
One member of Agudath Israel who was involved in every aspect of the law said that Ms. Weinstein had gradually taken a deep personal interest in helping pass the bill.

“Usually, you go over to a legislator and you say that you have a bill, let’s see what you could do, and the legislator goes ahead and fights for it,” said the activist, who asked not to be named. “Over here it was a different ballgame — she actually helped draft the language with ideas how to do it and what to do.”

Ms. Weinstein said that the messages of gratitude she received since Thursday were “amazing.”

“Last Sunday when we were working on the [final] language [of the bill], I was at Lev Bais Yaakov’s graduation,” said Ms. Weinstein, who chairs the Assembly’s judiciary committee. “I presented a certificate to one of the students and then I said, ‘I feel bad, I have to leave early. I have to go to work.’
“I figured a couple of people chuckled, like, me going to work? So I said that we are working on this legislation to help [special-ed] parents. There was this spontaneous applause because there are so many people who have a family member that has a child and just know of the struggle that families have to go through.”

The law requires cities and school boards for the first time to take “home environment and family background” into account when assigning a school; requires a final response on placements within 90 days; and ends the practice of relitigating the school placement each year.

While the bill has passed its most significant hurdle, New York City and several school boards across the state are objecting to some of its provisions on First Amendment grounds. It is unclear how Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who still has a pile of hundreds of bills to review and sign, or veto, which were passed over the legislative session that just ended, will react to the bill.

“The next project is getting the bill signed by the governor,” said Ms. Weinstein. “I feel confident that the governor will sign it. You shouldn’t put politics ahead of the children.”

The State Education Department, a quasi-independent government entity, has already approved the language of the bill but has not weighed in on its constitutionality.

The bill’s sponsors are optimistic that it will pass muster on both Constitutional and legal grounds and will be signed by the Democratic governor in time for it to take effect for the upcoming school year.

Gov. Cuomo usually signs bills every second Friday, so it could take months before he reaches the special-ed bill. The law was designed to take effect immediately upon receiving his signature.

While the law was passed at the urging of Agudath Israel to benefit Jewish families who are concerned over cultural factors — there are about 1,000 Orthodox Jewish families in New York City who use these services — it also helps special-needs children across the state who need smaller class sizes than in public school, or that need a particular type of service.

After city evaluaters assess a child and agree that the child needs special-ed services, they suggest a placement they consider best for the child — which they usually determine by how close it is to the child’s home, invariably in a public school setting. That becomes a major problem for Jewish parents, who send all their other children to yeshivos.

Ms. Weinstein said that she has heard from constituents over the years how hard it was to get a different placement than what the city wants but had not realized how bad it was until recently.

“It is so frustrating. I had heard the stories, but until I actually tried helping a couple of families, I didn’t realize how difficult the situation really was and how frustrating it has to be. [I hadn’t realized] that it becomes an adversarial process with the city,” she said.

“The family knows that is not right — because of the background and the culture that is not the right place for their child to be able to learn,” Ms. Weinstein noted. “Then they have to hire a lawyer, they decide on their own to put their child into one of the programs in a yeshivah, and then they have to fight with [the help of] a lawyer to get the city to agree to the placement.”

Ms. Weinstein said that she had discussions with various groups over the past several years but always thought there was not enough support for a bill. But in light of the recent successes Agudath Israel has had in getting pro-yeshivah bills through the legislature — principally TAP, a dream of askanim going back three decades — she decided to give it a push.

The watershed moment came on May 8, when Mrs. Leah Steinberg and Rabbi Shmuel Lefkowitz, vice president of Agudath Israel for community services, came to Albany to talk about the legislation. Ms. Weinstein promised to look into it but she later admitted that she herself was not that encouraging about the bill’s prospects.

Until she walked into the Assembly chamber.

“We went to session that day,” Ms. Weinstein recounted, “and there was — unbeknownst to Mrs. Steinberg and Rabbi Lefkowitz, to myself, to Dov [Hikind] — there was a boys’ yeshivah from Boro Park [Yeshivah Bonim Lamakom], a class of Down syndrome boys. They were introduced — you could see the excitement on their face, they were so happy to be in the chamber. And I realized that these are the children that we want to help.”

That image, which ran on Hamodia’s broadsheet of the Wednesday edition the next day, convinced Ms. Weinstein to put the strength of her seniority behind the bill. She called in favors from other lawmakers whom she had helped over the years.

“I said that it’s good I’ve been in the Assembly for a long time because over the years I’ve supported other members in their bills. I’ve chaired committees; I’ve helped members,” Ms. Weinstein said. “People also know my reputation. They know that if I’m sponsoring something, it’s something that has been looked at; it’s not like I just signed my name to something somebody else did but I was involved in it.”

In particular, of great help to the bill’s passage were two assemblywomen who did not represent Jewish areas — Cathy Nolan from Queens, the chairwoman of the Education Committee, and Assemblywoman Michelle Titus of the Rockaways, who had worked as a lawyer both for New York City’s department of education fighting the parents and then representing the parents against her former employer.

Ms. Titus “knew the system, so she had some ideas about what to do,” Ms. Weinstein said.

Sen. John Flanagan (R-Suffolk), chairman of the Education Committee, was the sponsor in the Senate, with Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos signing on as a co-sponsor.

“Those two shepherded the bill throughout the whole process in the State Senate,” one person close to the legislature emphasized.

Last Sunday, as the bill’s sponsors realized that they were within reach of a majority, the race was on to get the most favorable language in. The legislature was to go into recess on Thursday for the rest of the year, and the law states that any bill had to be printed and distributed to lawmakers at least 72 hours prior to a vote.

Five hours before the deadline — Sunday at midnight — Rabbi Lefkowitz gave his final opinion of the bill’s language to Ms. Weinstein.

“It’s good,” he said, “but if we could get rid of these two lines it would be a homerun.”

There was no time for any changes, which would then have to be reconciled with the Senate version as well. But Ms. Weinstein called Rabbi Lefkowitz shortly afterward, saying, “I’m too old for a career in baseball, so the only homerun I’m going to hit is with legislation.”

The two lines had been removed.

On Thursday, Ms. Weinstein stood anxiously near the Speaker’s well as the votes were coming in.

“The first call I made was to Chaskel Bennett, because Chaskel and I spent a couple of late nights on the telephone to go over things,” she said. “So once I saw … we got to 77 [votes] and I knew that it passed I called Chaskel and said, ‘I don’t know the final count but it’s gonna pass!’”

The law requires that the board take the family background into consideration when deciding where to place the child. Once they agree on a placement — which they have 90 days to work out — they must release the funds within 30 days. And as long as the child’s situation remains the same they cannot revisit their decision.

“You do this process, you get to the end of the school year and then you start all over again,” Ms Weinstein said. “The city says, ‘public school,’ and you say, ‘no, private school.’ They re-evaluate the child — that they have to do — but then they start arguing again over the placement all over again. … and it happens again year 3, year 4, year 5.”

“Once there’s a placement and it is approved, that’s the placement that stays,” she said.

One activist from Agudath Israel noted that this last provision may be the most significant.

“The first two are very critical,” he said, “but this is even more critical than the other two, because this can open the door to make life easier.”

Ms. Weinstein said that the fact that the family background must be taken into account should be a no-brainer.

“It’s really kind of self-evident but there wasn’t a way to hang your hat on saying, ‘This is a problem, your child doesn’t belong here,’” she said.
Mrs. Moseson injected a human aspect to the bill, saying that “even though [special-needs children] are limited, they can accomplish things if they are given the right schooling.”

Yaakov Bar-Horin, whose wife Bluma runs Yaldeinu, a school for autistic children on 16th Avenue and 63rd Street in Boro Park, said that he was excited when he heard that the bill passed. Watching how parents in Yaldeinu struggle to get into a school that is appropriate for an Orthodox Jew, only to have to fight for reimbursement and then repeat the lengthy court battles year after year, is extremely frustrating, he said.

Yaldeinu, which was founded six years ago, has 30 children from families from across the Brooklyn area; Shema Koleinu is the only other school in the area catering to autistic children from the Orthodox community.

“Nobody should know what it means to have a child with these types of disabilities,” Rabbi Bar-Horin said. “And on top of that, still to have this whole financial issue, with the fighting and going to court — do you know what it means, going to court? Some of these parents, they have enough on their plate.”

The bill was designed to be budget-neutral — it merely solves a bureaucratic headache for parents — but critics such as cities and school districts have claimed that it would open the door for children previously unqualified for special-ed services to enter the system.

Ms. Weinstein dismisses those claims.

“The city is going to save a lot of money because every year they fight. The parents have to hire lawyers; the city has lawyers that are employed, and they spend a lot of money on these hearings fighting the placement out of the public school system,” she said.

Each hearing is estimated to cost the city close to $30,000, plus an additional $7,000 for the parent.

Mrs. Steinberg of Agudath Israel pointed out that in 85 percent of the cases where the parents object to a placement, the city ends up settling.
“They agree,” Ms. Weinstein says. “But first they fight and fight and then they settle. And then the next year they start [the fight] all over again.”

The law is indeed “huge,” says Mrs. Moseson, whose son Yehuda Arye, 19, is developmentally delayed “in all aspects,” behavioral and physical. He has attended Special Torah Education Program (STEP) since he was six, and he loves going there.

“During vacation he is always asking, ‘Mommy, am I going to school today?’” she said.

However, Mrs. Moseson said that there is a “tremendous amount of anxiety and stress going into the process of planning for my son, especially over the past three or four years.”

The main problem is that the Board of Ed, seemingly without reason, changes the rules from year to year. Mrs. Moseson says that the best part of the new law is that it gives her a level of security that she does not have to fight anew every year for her son.

“You walk around thinking, what is the Board of Ed going to do next time?” Mrs. Moseson said.

The Board of Ed approved STEP for Yehuda Arye when he was six years old and for years did not revisit the issue. Three years ago, they called for a hearing on the placement and the Mosesons lost — meaning that unless Yehuda Arye went to public school, Mrs. Moseson would lose the approximately $30,000 of tuition that she had laid out, expecting reimbursement.

She refused to transfer Yehuda Arye that year. The next year, the Board of Ed cancelled all tuition and therapy payments, telling Mrs. Moseson she had to lay out the money herself and they would reimburse afterward.

The conundrum of bad news only intensified last year. The Board of Ed said that if she insisted on sending Yehuda Arye to private school, they would not reimburse her at all. They also cancelled the allowance for camp, something Yehuda Arye had received for the past decade.

While camp was reinstated two weeks ago, and Mrs. Moseson says that the people she speaks to at the hearings are nice and even commiserate with her — “I don’t feel like they are out to get to me,” says — the hearings’ outcomes, which come from bureaucrats she has never met, just kept on getting worse.

So when she heard that the bill passed on Thursday, she was euphoric.
“For one, it is such a relief to walk into a session and to say, ‘This school is not culturally appropriate for my child,’” she said.

During the hearing three years ago which she lost, she said she tried explaining how the language she heard during several visits to the public school placement was shocking in her community.

“I tried to explain to the hearing officer, that in my community, if my son picks up this kind of language — and he is very susceptible to pick that up, when he gets angry he is going to say what he heard — I won’t have volunteers coming to my house anymore; I can never take him to shul; I can’t even take him to family functions — it is going to impact him academically since it will completely ostracize him.”

“So the fact that you could say that this school is culturally inappropriate is huge,” she said. “If this legislation goes through, I’m happy for the parents who are coming in now. I only have another two years left in the system because he is going to age out.”