The Judge's Final Order

The Administrative Law Judge issued her Final Order regarding the hearing on 7/3/01. There were errors in some of what she wrote, and it appeared as though she didn’t want to come down very hard on Portland Public Schools. There was no mention of perjured testimony, or him having his civil rights violated at Grant which was disappointing, but we weren’t supposed to win this thing in the first place.

She wrote that what she found was that PPS had not lived up to its obligations to Joseph, and had in fact denied him a Free Appropriate Public Education as a student in special education. She ordered them to pay for real academic training at Sylvan Learning Center. She said it was outside her jurisdiction to make them fix the mess which was his student file. She wrote of a way that we could go about getting this taken care of, but we weren’t about to jump through more hoops with those people.

The district dragged its feet about paying up, but eventually came through with the cash. This came shortly after we wrote that we believed they were nearing “contempt of court”. Funny how that went...
Joseph received a check for somewhere between 18,000 and 19,000 dollars. He spent almost 1 ½ years at Sylvan. The teachers he had taught him real math, real reading, and real writing. They were very fond of Joseph. He never attacked them, worked very hard, and LEARNED. They were so impressed with him that I believe they gave him more hours of instruction than the money paid for. When he finished they gave him a party with gifts of books, pens, and lots of writing tablets. Suzanne and I never had 1 problem with them.

THE END