Opinion ID: 346756
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: identification of students

Text: 52 We now turn to the remaining issue, namely, whether Judge Newcomer erred in requiring the District to identify all learning disabled students in the system. 53 The District maintains that such an order goes beyond the Pennsylvania statutory mandate. Under Pennsylvania law, only exceptional children are entitled to special educational services. 65 And exceptional children are those who are sufficiently abnormal so as to require special services. 66 The District concedes that some learning disabled students fit within the exceptional category inasmuch as their disorders are so serious that they cannot benefit from regular education. However, the District continues, not all learning disabled children are necessarily extraordinary children, since some can benefit from a standard educational program and are consequently not in need of special educational services. Because not all learning disabled students must be given a special education under state law, the District concludes that the state statutes and regulations do not require it to identify all learning disabled students. 54 In reply, the plaintiffs have put forward a series of contentions to support Judge Newcomer's conclusion. They urge, first, that the state regulations indicate that all learning disabled students are to be considered exceptional children. This is so, they assert, since one of the subcategories of exceptional children handicapped school-aged persons is defined as including learning disabled children. 67 55 The plaintiffs also propose a more functional argument. They note that a large proportion of the learning disabled students in the Philadelphia public school system are presently unidentified. If such students were identified, it might be ascertained that some of them are not in need of special education. However, the plaintiffs add, the only means by which it can be determined which learning disabled children are exceptional, and thus entitled under state law to special services, is to identify the entire population of learning disabled children, to assess the severity of the disability of each of them, and thereby to determine whether they are in need of special education. 56 We find this latter proposition to be persuasive. Identification is a means to the end of assuring that those children who are entitled to special educational services receive them. The District's present identification methods, as Judge Newcomer found, are somewhat haphazard and ineffective. 68 As noted above, only 1300 of the estimated 8000 learning disabled students in the system are presently identified. It is possible that, as the District claims, many or most of these unidentified learning disabled students do not need special educational services or are currently receiving adequate remedial services. However, so long as these students are unidentified and the nature and extent of their learning disabilities go unassessed, it will be impossible to know with any certainty whether the District is discharging its statutory obligation regarding these pupils. It would thus appear that the only way to assure that all students who require special educational services receive appropriate training pursuant to state law is for the District to adopt procedures calculated to isolate the entire population of learning disabled students and to evaluate the need of these pupils for special educational services. This is what Judge Newcomer ordered, and we cannot say that he misconstrued the mandate of Pennsylvania law in so holding. 57 It is important to emphasize those matters upon which we express no opinion. We do not rule upon the content of the education that Pennsylvania law requires the District to provide to its exceptional children. Nor do we address the problem of precisely which students must be given an appropriate education under the relevant statutes and regulations. We hold only that Judge Newcomer did not err in ordering that the District, in order to meet its statutory obligations towards exceptional children, must initially identify and evaluate all learning disabled students. 58 The order of the district court insofar as it mandates the identification of all learning disabled students in the District will be affirmed. 69