Disabled student gets taken for a ride over afterschool program

Source: The Buffalo News, N.儲存Y.Nov. 16--In Jackie McBride's view, allowing her disabled daughter to attend an afterschool program in Lockport should have been as simple as opening the doors of her bus and letting her off.The bus, after all, stopped outside the school every day for months to drop off another student.Instead, McBride has spent two years and has had to enlist the help of an attorney in the hopes of getting the Wilson Central School District to let her daughter, Sydney Leszczak, get off the bus when it stops in Lockport on its 80-minute drive home from Sydney's day program.But what really angers McBride is what happened after a state review officer ordered the district to allow her daughter off of the bus. The bus route was changed, McBride said she was told. It would no longer stop at the Lockport school where the afterschool program is offered."It's incredible that this case has gone through this process," said Ron Hager, a senior staff attorney for the National Disability Rights Network. "The school bus literally stops at their building and they refuse to let her off the bus. They've gone through two due process hearings, an appeal to the state and maybe even potentially to court."A school district attorney, citing federal student privacy laws and the potential for a pending appeal, won't discuss details of the case involving McBride's daughter. But the district has argued in two administrative hearin迷你倉s that state education law and its own district transportation policies prevent it from allowing Sydney off the bus -- an argument Sydney's attorney and an impartial state hearing officer rejected."From our perspective, we didn't do anything wrong," said the district's attorney, Ryan L. Everhart, a partner with Hodgson Russ who specializes in education law. "We intend to present our case to the federal court, and we think that a fair review will show that what we did was appropriate."Sydney's family moved into the Wilson Central School District in 2010, the same year she began attending an afterschool program run by People Inc. at Lockport High School.Because Sydney, 19, is intellectually disabled, she attends special education classes at Orleans-Niagara Board of Cooperative Educational Services in Medina. And for a few months, the district continued to transport her to the People Inc. afterschool program in Lockport on her daily trip from Medina to Wilson.Then, in August 2011, the district told McBride it would no longer drop her daughter off at the afterschool program. The district told McBride in a letter in 2011 that it was prohibited from transporting a student to or from a site other than a student's home or school, according to an appeal decision.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.) Visit The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.) at .buffalonews.com Distributed by MCT Information Servicesself storage