CROSS RIVER, N.Y. - On a night when consultants were suggesting ways the Katonah-Lewisboro School District might reshape its special-education program, parents of special-needs students were insisting they deserved a seat at the table.
Unhappy with the district’s handling of their youngsters, they called for creation of a Special Education Parents Advisory Committee to give them a voice on policy, accountability and advocacy.
An online petition campaign asking the school district to create the advisory panel has already gotten “many, many signatures,” Kat Schrier of South Salem told the school board’s June 12 meeting.
Schrier and four other parents took their complaints to the microphone last week.
Any school district’s special-education department is a potential flashpoint, and KLSD’s has come under fire on and off over these past several years. After leadership changed in 2023, following a couple of years of well-organized, high-volume critiques by a parents group, criticism of the program, if any, was not heard in public. Nevertheless, earlier this year the district turned to Public Consulting Group (PCG) for advice on improving the department’s operations.
For just over an hour at the June 12 board meeting, Jennifer Baribeau and Matthew Korobkin, special education advisors with PCG, reviewed the consultancy’s findings, which included need for a wholesale overhaul of the department’s leadership structure.
The study cited “inconsistent communication, overlapping roles and conflicting guidance” leading to “confusion around policy interpretation, procedural implementation and decision-making processes, undermining trust in district-level leadership.”
Most of the special-ed parents who came to the microphone last week thanked the district for commissioning the report. But they did not endorse everything in it—and criticized what they deemed omissions.
Melissa Dilmaghani of Katonah, who launched the online petition at change.org, was first to speak, and she saluted the Public Consultancy Group, saying, “Thank you, the PCG crew, for the study, for the report.”
She said the slide-show presentation the consultants made to the board “was beautiful, but it also didn’t fully cover what the full comprehensive report did. So, I do really, really urge all of you to find it in your hearts to find time in your schedule to really review the full report.”
Seth Squadron, who has a child with an individualized education program (IEP), also found the account lacking. “Nowhere in the report,” he said, “does it describe the trauma that these children with special needs experience because of the refusal of the district to meet their needs when it was cheaper and easier for the district to do so.”
The Katonah resident said, “The report seems to indicate that the failure of special education in this district is a perception problem, that somehow the district has all these bright spots, but they are misunderstood. This is not true. This district has persistently and consistently failed to meet the needs of children with special needs. Period.”
Schrier, a mother of three KLSD students, two of them with IEPs, pressed the board to create the parent advisory body. “It will show that you really care, and that you want to create that compassionate culture,” she said.
Schrier thinks “there needs to be a complete overhaul of the culture that’s there right now. There should not just be talk about inclusion. . . . Even myself, I do not feel included when I go into the schools, so how can my kids feel included?”
Earlier in this decade, two Katonah moms, Meredith Black and Erika Glick, spearheaded a lengthy, but ultimately futile, effort to convince the school board and district leaders that parents deserved a place at the literacy table.
Self-described as exhausted and “retired” after those battles, Glick returned to the lectern last week to commend school officials for pursuing the consultants’ input on special needs. “I was delighted to know that PCG was given the green light to examine KLSD’s special-ed program,” she said.
“Thank you for being willing to take a critical look at what our district does, and to do better—or to attempt to do better,” Glick said. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted: to try to do better.”
Black, for her part, extolled the job KLSD’s assistant superintendent for curriculum has done in just her first two years in the position. “I want to applaud Julia Drake,” she said, “for being a member of our community because since she has joined this district I have seen meaningful changes in the approaches to literacy.”
On the push for parents on a special-ed advisory committee, Black squarely supported the petitioners. “We do have students that have many challenges,” she said. “But we also have parents that have a lot of knowledge on how to go about [meeting] them.”
Despite their lifetime of skills and experience, parents are too often dismissed because they’re “only categorized as a parent,” Black told the KLSD trustees. “Our knowledge and backgrounds are dismissed as being less than the teachers and this board, which I don’t think any of you mean to do.”
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