64 Pa. Commw. 192 | Pa. Commw. Ct. | 1982
Opinion by
Melissa Silvio, an eight-year-old hearing impaired person, who resides with her parents in the School District of Pittsburgh, had been attending DePaul Institute, an approved private school for hearing impaired children, from the time her impairment was discovered when she was, about three years old. Her attendance at DePaul has' been publically funded. When Melissa attained the school attendance age of six years, the school district, after a review of her case records kept by DePaul, determined that an appropriate program would be her attendance at the district’s Beechwood School, an elementary school having special programs for hearing impaired children. Melissa’s parents, the appellants here, objected to the proposed placement, believing that Melissa was making good progress in her ability to speak and understand speech at DePaul and that the district should so provide. They asked for and were accorded the due process hearing provided for at 24 Pa. Code §13.31. After five days of hearings which produced almost eight hundred pages of testimony, the hearing officer filed a report containing findings and a recommendation to the Commonwealth Secretary of Education that the program proposed by the district for Melissa, her placement at Beechwood, was appropriate. On appeal, the Secretary of Education agreed with the hearing officer’s recommendation but by imposing upon the district the duty to provide Melissa with a program which would concentrate on her oral development.
This case is .almost identical on the -facts with the case of Savka v. Department of Education, 44 Pa. Commonwealth Ct. 62, 403 A.2d 142 (1979) and many of the appellants’-objections.to the placement of their daughter in'-the public school system are the same as those made and disposed of adversely to the parents’ positions in that case. In this category of complaint is
The appellants also complain that they were denied an impartial hearing because the hearing officer was a professor at Slippery Bock State College and therefore, as they term it, an employee of the Secretary of Education. In SmTca, we held this issue to have been waived for failure of the parents to object to the hearing officer’s conducting the hearing; here an objection was made. We reject the appellants ’ thesis on the merits of this case. The only regulation on the subject is that found at 22 Pa. Code §13.32(12) which states that the hearing officer should not be an officer, employee or agent of the school district or inter
The Director of the Division for Exceptional Children of the School District of Pittsburgh testified that upon Melissa’s attaining school age, he and his staff reviewed the Individualized Educational Program developed for her at DePaul and concluded that the program at the district’s Beechwood Elementary School would be appropriate, and would further have the advantage of being less restrictive than the program at DePaul.
The supervisor of the program for hearing impaired children in the Pittsburgh schools, formerly a classroom teacher of the hearing impaired at Beechwood, testified that there are two classrooms set aside at Beechwood exclusively for the education of hearing impaired children; that there are seven hearing impaired children in the Beechwood program; that there are two teachers who work on an individual basis with
The speech and language specialist for the hearing impaired, whose duty for the school district is that of visiting schools attended by hearing impaired students and to help its children with their speech and language, testified that he spent some 25 to 30 per cent of his week at Beechwood working individually with seven students there attending.
An audiologist employed by the school district testified that she calls on the students at Beechwood regularly and there inspects the amplification of each of their personal hearing aids and of the classroom amplification system, consults with the children’s parents and performs periodic ear testing of her charges.
The full time teacher of the hearing impaired children at Beechwood described her daily regime in the classroom and during her charges’ attendance at other classes. She recounted her responsibility for preparing education programs for each of the children and for consulting with the parents, an event that sometimes happens daily. As we have mentioned, this evidence, of which .the foregoing is a very sketchy description, since each of the witnesses was minutely cross-examined by the appellants ’ counsel, clearly provides ample evidence for the findings upon which the conclusion that Beechwood’s program was appropriate was based.
Consideration of the appellants’ evidence brings us to the nub of this case, the appellants ’ no doubt sincere belief that the school district’s basic method of teaching the hearing impaired is wrong, at least for
There are in fact three recognized basic methods of teaching the hearing impaired: verbal-tonal, oral-aural and total communication. Of the three, only the oral-aural method used at DePaul eschews signing, that is, manual communication. Both the verbal-tonal and total communication methods use signing. The Beechwood School employs the total communication method which uses all methods including, but not to the exclusion of any other means, the use of signing. For instance, at Beechwood, when the hearing impaired children are placed in classrooms with nonexceptional children, a manualist stands at the front of the room and signs what transpires in speech between the teacher and the students. The appellants, supported by their expert witness, believe that Melissa’s progress in understanding and speaking which she has achieved at DePaul will be impeded by her being exposed to signing. On the other hand, the experts produced by the school district are of the belief that signing will not impede Melissa’s speaking and further that her association with nonexceptional children, not available at DePaul, will improve her ability to communicate with others, including orally. The case, therefore presents to some degree a clash of philosophies among experts in the field, with respect to which we have no disposition, if we had the power, to overturn the conclusions, based on ample evidence, reached by the school district and upheld by the Secretary of Education. We add in this aspect of the case that the Secretary’s decision is consistent with the order of preference for educational placement for handicapped school
The appellants pose five additional questions, all insubstantial, which we shall address briefly. First, they contend that Melissa’s placement in Beechwood was inappropriate because the district failed to prove that its special educational program had been approved by the Department of Education as required by statute and regulation. While the district bore the burden of showing that its placement of Melissa was proper, it was not required to prove it had complied with every requirement of law and rule regulating the conduct of its affairs in the absence of any suggestion much less proof that it was in fact in default.
Second, the appellants say that the hearing examiner’s order made preliminary to the hearing prejudged the asserted issue of whether the placement of Melissa at Beechwood was from a more to less restrictive environment. In fact, the preliminary order merely noted that a transfer from a private school teaching only hearing impaired to a public school teaching both exceptional and unexceptional children is by definition a transfer from a more to a less restrictive environment — a circumstance clearly established by regulation 22 Pa. Code §13.11 (d).
Third, the appellants contend that Beechwood personnel were not provided in-service training as required by 22 Pa. Code §341.57(d). The record shows that training sessions were in fact conducted at Beechwood although not all of the staff attended.
Fourth, the appellants argue that the district failed to show that Beechwood was an appropriate placement because there was no proof presented regarding am
The appellants contend, that the district failed to show that the composition of the class of hearing impaired students at Beechwood was appropriate. In fact, the evidence shows that the other children at Beechwood were similar in age, hearing loss and intellectual capacity to Melissa.
Order affirmed.
Order
And Now, this 20th day of January, 1982, the order of the Secretary of Education is affirmed.