Opinion ID: 3010241
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Formulating a Standard

Text: In the case at bar, the court devoted only one paragraph of its opinion to compensatory education and disposed of the issue in the following manner: With respect to plaintiffs' request for compensatory education, the Court concludes that such relief is inappropriate under the facts of this case. Plaintiffs rely on Lester H. by Octavia P. v. Gilhool, 916 F.2d 865 (3d Cir. 1990), cert. denied, 488 U.S. 923 (1991), in which the school district knew before the child entered the school system that the 5 In the process, we made clear that compensatory education could be awarded to plaintiffs who had already reached age twenty-one. Lester H. v. Gilhool, 916 F.2d 865, 872 (3d Cir. 1990). 13 district would be unable to provide an appropriate education. Id. at 873. The decision to permit compensatory education was premised on the district's failure to fulfil what it knew or should have known were its obligations. Id. The facts of the present case are easily distinguishable. Defendant provided J.C. with an education which it believed in good faith was appropriate. A difference of opinion as to the adequacy of an educational program is not equivalent to a complete and total failure to provide a child with an education. Therefore, this Court will not grant plaintiffs' motion with respect to this issue. Thus, the district court applied a good faith standard in determining whether to award compensatory education. We review this approach de novo. In order to define the correct standard for granting compensatory education, we must delineate the threshold of deficiency in the school board's stewardship necessary to trigger an award. Unfortunately, there is little caselaw or legal commentary to guide us. Likewise there are no New Jersey or federal regulations to direct our inquiry. While this is not the first time we have contemplated this issue, the facts of our previous cases have made our past analyses relatively straightforward. In Lester H., 916 F.2d at 873, we upheld an award of two-and-one-half years of compensatory education due to the school district's outrageous behavior. In the fall of 1984, the district admitted that the twelve-year-old plaintiff was not 14 receiving an appropriate education. Despite the existence of at least six suitable schools, the district did not locate an appropriate placement until January of 1987. Id. at 873. We wrote: [W]e hold that the district court did not abuse its discretion when it fashioned this remedy for Lester. The court's award merely compensates Lester for what everyone agrees was an inappropriate placement from 1984 through January, 1987 and belatedly allows him to receive the remainder of his free and appropriate public education. Id. In Carlisle Area School v. Scott P., 62 F.3d 520 (3d Cir. 1995), we reviewed a district court's decision to grant six months compensatory education. We reversed the award because the record contained no evidence indicating that the relevant IEP was inappropriate. We concluded that, while we did not need to define the precise standard for awarding compensatory education, we could at least determine that it was necessary -- though not sufficient -- to show that some IEP was actually inappropriate. Id. at 537. We noted that most cases awarding compensatory education had involved quite culpable conduct6 but determined 6 See, e.g., Burr v. Ambach, 863 F.2d 1071, 1073 (2d Cir. 1988) (awarding compensatory education where state institution disqualified a student because of its purported inability to accommodate his multiple handicaps without mentioning or considering placement in an extant special program for multiple handicapped students); Jefferson County Bd. of Educ. v. Breen, 853 F.2d 853, 857-58 (11th Cir. 1988) (awarding compensatory education to deter states from unnecessarily prolonging litigation); Miener v. Missouri, 800 F.2d 749, 754 (8th Cir. 1986) (reversing denial of compensatory education for a child who spent three years in mental health ward of a state hospital after 15 that a grant of compensatory education did not require bad faith on the part of the school district. Id. We left our analysis there, but must now flesh out the standard left sparse by Carlisle. The Second Circuit has conditioned an award of compensatory education on the presence of a gross deprivation of the right to free and appropriate education. See Garro v. Connecticut, 23 F.3d 734, 737 (2d Cir. 1994) (requiring gross procedural violation); Mrs. C. v. Wheaton, 916 F.2d 69, 75 (2d Cir. 1990) (requiring gross violation, defined as coercion of disabled child into terminating his right to further education). We reject this formulation because, in addition to being imprecise, it is not anchored in the structure or text of IDEA. If the compensatory education standard is to spring from the Act, it must focus from the outset upon the IEP -- the road map for a disabled child's education. See 20 U.S.C. §1414(a)(5). When an IEP fails to confer some (i.e., more than de minimis) educational benefit to a student, that student has been deprived of the appropriate education guaranteed by IDEA. It seems clear, therefore, that the right to compensatory education should accrue from the point that the school district knows or should know of the IEP's failure.7 district failed to provide any educational services notwithstanding its own evaluation recommending such services). 7 This precept is consistent with our decision in Carlisle Area School v. Scott P., 62 F.3d 520, 537 (3d Cir. 1995), where we held that an award of compensatory education required a finding that an IEP was inappropriate. 16 The school district, however, may not be able to act immediately to correct an inappropriate IEP; it may require some time to respond to a complex problem. Thus, our holding can be summarized as follows: a school district that knows or should know that a child has an inappropriate IEP or is not receiving more than a de minimis educational benefit must correct the situation. If it fails to do so, a disabled child is entitled to compensatory education for a period equal to the period of deprivation, but excluding the time reasonably required for the school district to rectify the problem. We believe that this formula harmonizes the interests of the child, who is entitled to a free appropriate education under IDEA, with those of the school district, to whom special education and compensatory education is quite costly. Obviously the case against the school district will be stronger if the district actually knew of the educational deficiency or the parents had complained. But a child's entitlement to special education should not depend upon the vigilance of the parents (who may not be sufficiently sophisticated to comprehend the problem) nor be abridged because the district's behavior did not rise to the level of slothfulness or bad faith. Rather, it is the responsibility of the child's teachers, therapists, and administrators - and of the multidisciplinary team that annually evaluates the student's progress - to ascertain the child's educational needs, respond to deficiencies, and place him or her accordingly. 17 While we have little hard data on compensatory education, we do know that administrative law judges in this Circuit have awarded it. Our new standard meshes with the approach taken by these judges. See In Re Jeremy H., No. 593, slip op. at 27 (Special Education Appeals Review Panel Pa. May 21, 1993) (upholding compensatory education in order to rectify an inappropriate IEP). Our holding also accords with the conclusions of a recent article reviewing federal court strategies for awarding compensatory education. See Perry A. Zirkel, The Remedy of Compensatory Education under the IDEA, 95 Ed. Law Rep. 483 (1995). That article maintains that, in general, the prerequisite of a compensatory education award has not been the gross, egregious, or bad faith conduct of the school district but rather a simple finding that a child has received an inappropriate education. Since the district court applied an incorrect standard, its order denying compensatory education must be reversed. The court found that J.C.'s IEP was inappropriate. It determined that the majority of the skills that J.C. possessed at the time of Dr. Henning's evaluation were gained before J.C. was placed at OCDTC in 1987, that the same rate of progress did not continue after he was placed at OCDTC, and that J.C. plateaued in 1989. Thus, J.C.'s educational deprivation appears to have lasted a long time. On remand, the district court should determine when the Central Regional knew or should have known that J.C.'s IEP was inappropriate or that he was not receiving more than de minimis educational benefit; it should also define the reasonable 18 time within which the district should have done something about it. Compensatory education should accrue from that point forward. The order of the district court will therefore be affirmed in part and reversed in part and the case remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. _____________________ 19