T.F. G.F. S.F., a Minor, by His Mother and Next Friend, G.F. v. Special School District of St. Louis County Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary EducationT.F. G.F. S.F., a Minor, by His Mother and Next Friend, G.F. v. Special School District of St. Louis County Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
Counsel who presented argument on behalf of appеllee Special School District was Robert G. Thomeczek of St. Louis, Missouri. Counsel who presented argument on behalf of appellee Missouri Department of Education was Sarah E. Ledgerwood of Jefferson City, Missouri. Also appearing on the brief was Jeremiah W. (Jay) Nixon.
Before LOKEN, Chief Judge, McMILLIAN* and MELLOY, Circuit Judges.
LOKEN, Chief Judge.
The parents of S.F., a student with educational disabilities, unilaterally placed their son in out-of-state private residential schools after the Special School District of St. Louis (“the District“) refused to place S.F. in a full-time residential program. The family commenced these proceedings seeking relief under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (“IDEA“),
S.F. suffers from disabling psychological conditions that have been diagnosed as including pervasive developmental disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and attentiоn deficit/hyperactivity disorder. His educational assessments include language impaired, learning disabled in written expression, and “educational autism.” S.F. attended local public schools through the fourth grade, participating in mainstream classrooms and receiving several hours of special education services per week under individualized education programs (“IEPs“) developed by the District. Behavioral problems developed in the third grade and continued in the fourth grade. Though his fourth grade teacher recommended that S.F. move on to fifth grade, his parents instead enrolled him in the Churchill School, a private school for children with learning disabilities. S.F. performed well at Churchill in the fifth grade, but his behavior deteriorated in the sixth grade. His parents then enrolled him at Metropolitan School, another private school for children with learning disabilities. The parents did not use the IEP process in placing S.F. at Churchill and then at Metropolitan.
S.F. attended Metropolitan for seventh grade. His academic performance was satisfactory but behavior problems persisted. Metropolitan told the parents that S.F. should attend a different school for eighth grade but agreed he could attend Metropolitan the first semestеr while the parents arranged a different placement. S.F. was sent home or suspended for bad behavior so often during the first half of eighth grade (the fall of 2001) that he was essentially home schooled. The parents withdrew S.F. from Metropolitan at the еnd of that semester and sought services from the District, which helped arrange an interim homebound instruction program for the second half of eighth grade. At the end of that semester, S.F.‘s special education teachers said that he had progressed academically and was well-behaved.
In early 2002, the District completed a re-evaluation of S.F. and began discussing an IEP for the upcoming ninth grade school year with his parents. The parents argued that a full-time residential program was the only wаy S.F. could receive a free appropriate public education. When the District disagreed, the parents asked the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (“the Department“) for a due process hearing. The District completed its proposed IEP on May 27, 2002. The plan called for S.F. to spend fourteen hours per week in Project Achieve at S.F.‘s local public high school and twelve and a half hours at Epworth Center, a nearby private facility, with аn additional four hours of language therapy, social work, and psychological counseling.
Unhappy with the IEP, and convinced that S.F. needed a full-time residential program, the parents enrolled S.F. at Pathways School, a private residential institution in Pennsylvania. S.F. was at Pathways from June until November 2002, when the school decided it was not a good fit because S.F. had not progressed and had negative interactions with other students. The parents then enrolled S.F. in the Chamberlain School, a privatе residential facility in Massachusetts. In February 2003, S.F. and his parents amended their request for a due process hearing, seeking reimbursement for tuition and other expenses at Churchill, Metropolitan, Pathways, and Chamberlain.2
II.
The IDEA as amended in 1997 “does not require a local educational agency to pay for the cost of education . . . at a private school or facility if that agency made a free appropriate publiс education available to the child and the parents elected to place the child in such private school or facility.” Jasa v. Millard Pub. Sch. Dist. No. 17, 206 F.3d 813, 815 (8th Cir. 2000), quoting
A child receives a free appropriate public education if he receives “personalized instruction with sufficient support services to permit the child to benefit educationally from that instruction.” Rowley, 458 U.S. at 203, 102 S.Ct. 3034. The IDEA requires that public school districts offer eligible children “instruction and supportive services reasonably calculated to provide some educational benefit.” Springfield, 358 F.3d at 999 n. 7. The statute also rеquires that students with disabilities be educated in the “least restrictive environment,”
The focus of this appeal is whether the District‘s May 2002 IEP offered S.F. a free appropriate public education in the ninth grade. But the context is unusual. S.F.‘s parents unilaterally withdrew S.F. from the public schools four years earlier, when they placed him at Churchill, a private school, for the fifth grade. The hearing panel concluded that the District provided S.F. a free appropriate public education in the fourth grade. That ruling is not challenged on appeal. Thereafter, the Churchill and Metropolitan private schools could not deal with S.F.‘s behavioral problems. S.F.‘s experiences at Churchill and Metropolitan led his parents to conclude that he could only receive meaningful educational benefits through placement in a full-time residential program. But the District and its IEP team were not part of this process. Only when S.F. was in effect expelled from Metropolitan during eighth grade did the parents turn for help to the District, which had always been willing to provide S.F. placement in its public schools. The immediate result was an interim homebound program in which, according to his special education teachers, S.F. advanced academically and was well-behaved.
On appeal, the family argues that the May 2002 IEP was not sufficiently tailored to S.F.‘s unique needs because the Distriсt did not adequately research his experiences at Churchill and Metropolitan and did not communicate with S.F.‘s mental health care providers in deciding not to offer a full-time residential program. But this is not a case where all the experts “reached the conclusion that a residential placement is necessary in order for [S.F.] to get an education.” Indep. Sch. Dist. No. 284 v. A.C., 258 F.3d 769, 777 (8th Cir.2001). The District‘s IEP team provided S.F. a free appropriate public education through the fourth grade, were denied that opportunity in the fifth through eighth grades, and then proposed a unique combination of public school special education services for the ninth grade. The experts on the administrative panel found that the IEP focused on S.F.‘s individual needs and providеd him a free appropriate public education. We “must defer to the judgment of education experts who craft and review a child‘s IEP so long as the child receives some educational benefit and is educated alongside his non-disablеd classmates to the maximum extent possible.” Gill v. Columbia 93 Sch. Dist., 217 F.3d 1027, 1038 (8th Cir.2000).
S.F.‘s parents rejected the IEP, concluding that only a full-time residential placement would provide their son “meaningful” education benefit. But “IDEA mandates individualized `appropriate’ education for disаbled children, it does not require a school district to provide a child with the specific educational placement that [his] parents prefer.” Blackmon v. Springfield R-XII Sch. Dist., 198 F.3d 648, 658 (8th Cir.1999). The May 2002 IEP offered unique services tailored to S.F.‘s needs. That may not have satisfied S.F.‘s parents, but it sаtisfied the requirements of IDEA. As we said in Evans, 841 F.2d at 832:
There was no guarantee that the programs proposed by Millard [Public Schools] would have accommodated Christine. However, the school district should have had the opportunity, and to an extent had the duty, to try these less restrictive alternatives before recommending a residential placement.
The judgment of the district court is affirmed.