At age 12, Luka Hyde is currently working on picking up girls, said his mother during Wednesday’s hearing at Federal Court.
Though endearing, this was not a joke. Luka has Down syndrome and receives occupational, physical, and speech therapy in order to improve his social and fine motor skills.
Deborah Hyde said her son, like most boys, has always been interested in girls. Right now his speech therapist is helping him learn how to approach girls and ask them questions—necessary skills for boys to have whether or not they are intellectually disabled, Ms. Hyde believes.
In 2013 Ms. Hyde and her husband Greg filed a lawsuit against the Hamilton County Department of Education and the Tennessee Department of Education after learning their son, nine years old at the time, would be removed from his school at Normal Park Museum Magnet.
Luka had attended general education classes at Normal Park since kindergarten. His parents thought he was performing well in the mainstream and intended to keep him there. But midway through Luka’s second grade year, Normal Park Principal Jill Levine along with other Hamilton County school officials told Mr. and Ms. Hyde their son had “hit a wall” academically, and would need to be moved to the intensive special education program offered at Red Bank Elementary.
In November of 2015 a settlement of $185,000 was approved between the Hydes and the state. However, the due process case between the family and Hamilton County is still pending.
Because the Hydes did not agree with Hamilton County’s decision to send their son to the comprehensive development classroom (CDC) at Red Bank, they opted to enroll him at The Montessori School where he now receives a private education.
Luka started at Montessori in third grade and is now in fifth grade. His parents are seeking reimbursement from Hamilton County for their son’s tuition and assistant fees, which would not have been incurred had Normal Park not removed Luka from its program.
The sum of the fees from Luka’s third grade to fifth grade years amounts to $63,149.
At the hearing Ms. Hyde said she and her husband have paid the classroom assistant at Montessori, Sarah Goddard, an average of $15,000 a year to work with their son one-on-one. Because Ms. Goddard changed from being the overall classroom assistant to being Luka’s assistant once he came into the school, the Hydes made the deal with the school to pay her themselves.
They were willing to do this because she was “as much focused on [Luka’s] development” as they were. And though Hamilton County school attorneys alleged that Ms. Goddard became the Hydes’ personal employee, records show the assistant continued to receive her year-end W2s from the school.
During the hearing, a Hamilton County school attorney said Ms. Hyde previously testified that Lisa Hope, the special education teacher at Normal Park, did not communicate with her much during Luka’s second grade year.
Following this statement the attorney showed a document from Luka’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings logging Ms. Hope’s many phone calls, emails, and personal conversations between her and the Hydes from Aug. 2012 to May 2013.
“Ms. Hope worked hard to educate your son,” the school attorney said, to which Ms. Hyde replied that Ms. Hope did not.
The mother believes her son never “hit a wall” academically at Normal Park, that this was a case of segregation.
“My concern is that it was (Normal Park’s) characterization, almost based on assumption, that there was a wall he would hit,” she said at the hearing.
At home, Ms. Hyde daily works with Luka on reading, math, and science. The progress reports she received for him in 2013 reportedly showed he was anticipated to meet his academic goals by the end of the school year.
In fact, since starting at Montessori, Luka has gone from having his assistant for a full school day to only half the day. Ms. Hyde said the plan is to wean him off an assistant completely by the sixth grade.
The doubt in her mind about sending him to the CDC program at Red Bank surfaced from not knowing if there would be any effective academic instruction. She said the CDC would have removed him from general education classes and put him in a program with only disabled peers.
On this topic, Dr. Kathleen Whitbread, a nationally recognized expert in children with Down syndrome who evaluated Luka in Connecticut, said Tuesday she thinks Luka would progress better in a mainstream environment than a special education program like the CDC.
The hearing for the due process case between the Hydes and Hamilton County is set to continue until Thursday.