The Georgia Department of Education said Friday that they have shelved a plan to limit access to services for public school students with severe health issues after pushback from parents, advocates and educators.
Students whose medical needs prevent them from attending classes for an extended period of time have access to so-called hospital or homebound services such as virtual classes or one-on-one instruction with a teacher.
Under the current rule, students must anticipate being absent for 10 or more consecutive school days to receive those temporary services, which are intended to keep students on track with their courses while they are receiving treatment. In June, however, the state had proposed to increase to 15 the number of days a student was absent before qualifying for the extra help.
Over the last month, the department was flooded with negative feedback in written public comments and during a public hearing at the Jekyll Island Convention center last week..
“Due to the concerns expressed about the Homebound/Hospital rule changes during the public comment period, the Georgia Department of Education will not be moving forward with the proposed rule revisions,” the department’s policy division wrote in an email sent to advocates. “Superintendent Woods is committed to ensuring that decisions made by the Department keep students first.”
The Department of Education said the proposed changes were meant to improve the program and expand access to medical providers by creating more flexibility in how local schools and districts provide services.
Attorney and educational law specialist Leslie Lipson, based in Atlanta, said the status quo that requires up to 140 hours– nearly two weeks– of missed instruction before students qualify for services was already onerous for students with limiting physical and psychological conditions. That benchmark already put them in danger of not being able to catch up on school work.
“If we were to say how many hours are too many hours to force kids with significant support needs to miss, I think there was an argument that the old law was too many days,” she told The Current last week. “But for sure, this new proposal” would have been too much, she added.
Lipson has been an advocate for families of students with disabilities for over 20 years and leads the Georgia Coalition for Equity in Education. Lipson wrote a public comment to the state school board on July 10 that focused on the challenges facing for medical providers that also need to sign off on a student’s expected absence from the classroom before extra services can be approved.
Lipson added that students receiving extended treatment often need to maintain a connection to their community when they can’t be in a classroom, which is what homebound services are designed to accomplish. Delaying services would have diverged from federal disability laws like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) designed to ensure students with disabilities receive a quality education, she said.
“If a student is experiencing major psychiatric issues, you want to help them cling on to that role of student, or of a member of the band at school, or whatever their connections are. That’s so important. We really want to hold on to these pieces, and we’re putting up more barriers,” she said. “In part, the free and appropriate public education in IDEA is making sure that kids with disabilities are included in their neighborhood schools, and this is the idea of a placement that’s not permanent so they can reintegrate.”
Pam Farrie, the lead social worker for the Liberty County School System, said she opposed the proposed changes and was glad that the Department of Education dropped the plan.
“It could be stressful coming back to school and then you’re a week behind and you’ve got to catch up with everything that your classmates received, you gotta catch up with missing work, and then get back on target with where the class is now,” she said. “And for a chronically ill child, I just don’t think it can be mentally or physically healthy sometimes. And if you get so behind, I think some students may have a sense of just giving up and not being able to catch up after so many days.”
Teachers usually have to volunteer after school hours to provide homebound services and the longer that a student has missed classes, the more work it is for overburdened instructors to help them catch up, she said.
“You’re putting a lot more time in, and what if you have two or three students that are in that situation? We already know we don’t have enough teachers, we don’t have enough support at the school level for those things, not even for the students in the classroom,” Farrie said. “So it is difficult to find teachers that are willing sometimes to provide that support after school.”
Students missing instruction time is an issue that the Georgia Department of Education has been attempting to combat along with the state. Lipson said the proposed changes would have contradicted the state’s goals of keeping kids in school.
“We see a lot of movement in the state legislature, who’s all over this stuff around absenteeism, and now I see the state promulgating and proposing a rule that blesses and incentivizes kids to be out for a much longer period,” she said.
Farrie added that the rule change would’ve made things harder for schools in underserved communities.
“We’ve been dealing with chronic attendance problems since Covid. We need policies that can help us support our population of parents and students, and I think those would kind of exacerbate the problem. We’re a rural community, there is not a lot of support here to help those families and students. And increasing those days, if you’re not in school and you’re receiving instruction that’s gonna hurt test scores and that’s ultimately gonna hurt the schools scores, too.