THE CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST AT BISD

By Juan Montoya

As the members of the board of trustees of the Brownsville Independent School District continue to try to close the Special Needs Pandora's Box they opened upon the installation of the new majority last November, local residents are trying to sort out the issues in that department.

It seems that a day doesn't go by that a new revelation or allegation concerning the department is aired by either parents of special needs children, or by local community action groups or others assisting the parents of these children.

The board will listen today (Tuesday) to a level III grievance by five parents of special education students regarding the administration of the district’s Special Olympics program. The parents, Juanita Rodriguez, Patricia Martinez, Carmen Castillo, Lily Flores and Dora Guerra, allege favoritism in the administration of the program by Sandra Powers, the wife of former BISD board member Otis Powers.

They allege that Powers was placed in that position because she was married to a board member and not because of her qualifications.

Further, in the past they have presented a petition to the board saying that one of those favored by Powers was the son of a a board member. The scuttlebutt is that the allegation refers to Stephen Colunga, son of BISD board member Joe Colunga, Jr., a Special Needs student.

Among some of the complaints are that other Spacial Needs students were made to give up hotel accommodation for Colunga's son and placed in substandard lodgings to make room for him.

They have also alleged that some of them were not allowed to go to Special Olympics events aboard school buses while Colunga's son was give a bus all to himself and his mother allowed to ride with him.

The grievance has gone through two hearings (at Level I and Level II) and the hearing officers have ruled in favor of the district.

However, the parents have persisted and an community action group from Dallas, Acción America, has now lent its organizing and legal resources to aid them. There are even some indications that some sort of class-action lawsuit against the district and its board members is in the offing.

There are other dangers lurking in the bushes for the BISD and its board members.

One of the most chilling of these is the allegations that the district knew that the instruments used by BISD personnel to diagnose Special Needs children were defective and, in the words of BISD's own investigation, "legally indefensible."

Further, the warning to BISD and its board and administrators was that the personnel who were administering these defective diagnosis were themselves not qualified to determine if a child should be placed in the special needs or merely had some sort of English deficiency.

"That means that some of these children may not have needed to be placed in Special Needs classes and could be stigmatized for the rest of their lives," said Carlos Quintanilla, an organizer for Acción America. "Or worse, there may be children in the general population that needed to be in Special Needs and weren't."

To place a context on the size of this problem, the defective diagnoses could involve hundreds of children.

Those warnings, and BISD counsel's response to "dilute" the warning, are allegedly contained in the March 2009 Overton report.

The report/audit goes into great detail about the defective testing instruments used by BISD and makes reference to English deficient students being placed into special needs, not ESL.

Acción America said it has the report and will release it "in due time.

"We hope that BISD will have the courage to do so, to spare them the embarrassment that the information in that report contains," Quintanilla wrote.
How does something as arcane as a testing instrument and indefensible diagnosis of Special Needs children affect you and me and the Brownsville community?

Local attorneys say that a little known fact about John Allen Rubio, 27, a Porter High School graduate, who was found guilty November 2003 on three counts of capital murder in the deaths of his children Julissa Quesada, 3, John E. Rubio, 14 months and Mary Jane Rubio, 2, is that he might have been the subject of one of these defective diagnoses.

Rubio was tested in the same time period that the tests were termed "indefensible" in the BISD report. Although scant details have been released about Rubio's confidential school file, could a misdiagnosis of his condition have had a bearing on his later actions?

The children were smothered, stabbed and mutilated, and then beheaded, according to investigators. Rubio's conviction of killing the children was reversed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in September of last year thus granting him a new trial. His case is still being tried in Cameron County.