A federal judge on Wednesday ordered New York City to address failures to provide crucial services to public school students with disabilities, a major step that followed two decades of litigation and criticism from families in the nation’s largest school system.
The order could trigger the most expansive effort in recent years to address one major source of delays for families as they navigate the city’s vast special education system.
Thousands of families have won disputes over the district’s failures to accommodate their children. But even after an arbiter finds that the city owes a family services or payments, many still do not receive them for months.
Now, the city will be required to implement more than three dozen recommendations from a special monitor assigned to oversee Department of Education compliance, including recruiting new staff members to help process cases and creating a hotline for families to report problems.
The city must now also improve the technology it uses to process cases, which the monitor has called remarkably antiquated and a “root cause” of delays.
New York is home to nearly 200,000 students with disabilities, and the delays have persisted since at least 2003, during former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, when parents first sued the Department of Education over them.
They have left scores of pupils without adaptive technology devices, transportation, therapy or behavioral support.
The judge, Loretta A. Preska of the Southern District, said on Wednesday that the agreement represented a “massive step” toward change for children who had long been failed by the school district.
“Under the current system, payments have sometimes been delayed for years,” Judge Preska said in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, calling it an outcome “that no family should have to endure.”
David C. Banks, the schools chancellor, said in a statement that for years, the Education Department had “not done enough” to serve students with disabilities.
“The new requirements are stringent because we, too, believe that change is long overdue,” Mr. Banks said, adding that while “challenges increased over the past decade, we are moving aggressively to set a new course.”
The long road to Wednesday’s decision was a stark reflection of the hurdles that many families face in navigating New York’s complex special education system.
The system annually fails to provide all children with the services they require, and families can request independent hearings over the gaps.
But even after an arbiter determines the Education Department has failed in a case, the city regularly misses deadlines — often set at 35 days after a decision — to fix it.
In one three-month period last year, for example, the city failed to address more than 95 percent of all orders to provide payments or services on time, data shows.
The concerns were first raised in a 2003 lawsuit, and while the city eventually agreed to respond faster, progress later stalled.
Today, the department meets the deadlines less often than it did a decade ago, as the number of formal special education complaints has swelled and led to a significant backlog of cases.
The delays “make this system so burdensome for parents, and harm students in so many ways,” said Rebecca Shore, the litigation director at Advocates for Children, the nonprofit group that filed the 2003 suit with the firm Milbank.
The process, she added, “is especially hard for families who do not have resources.”
One public school parent, Maria, who spoke on the condition that she be identified by only her first name because of privacy concerns, said she filed a special education complaint four years ago for her son David, who has a learning disability.
A year later, the Education Department was ordered to pay for David, now 16, to attend a private tutoring center in Manhattan. But at one point, it owed the center more than $60,000, Maria’s lawyer said, and warned that her son might lose his spot if payment did not arrive.
The city was also required to pay about $47 a week for MetroCards to travel from the Bronx, she said. But Maria said she spent more than $1,200 of family funds on transportation while waiting months for reimbursement, and was forced to cut down on spending on groceries.
For other families too, the consequences of delays have been severe: One student did not receive required health services and was kept out of school for four years as a result, lawyers wrote in an earlier court filing. Some have waited for months to receive specialized transportation to school. And low-income parents have at times taken out mortgages or pulled from savings as they have waited for tuition reimbursements.
The Department of Education will now begin a major overhaul of its approach to those cases, including changing a byzantine system for processing them that relies on a mass of handwritten forms, scanned documents and manual data entry. The special monitor will track the city’s progress and file regular reports on potential issues.
The new plan will only tackle one of the many problems that have long plagued the city’s special education system. But the monitor, David Irwin, said that he was hopeful that it would help ease some of the burden on families.
“They’ve been at this for 20 years not making progress,” Mr. Irwin said, adding that if the city followed through on the plan, he was “100 percent confident” that meaningful change could finally arrive.
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