In the early 1990s, Education Law Center-PA attorneys challenged Pennsylvania’s inadequate system for educating children with complex disabilities. The class action case upended past practices and ensured access to a continuum of educational placements and services, with direct state involvement when needed, for such students.
The case, Cordero et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education, was filed in U.S. District Court as a class action.
Affidavits, including one from Irish Bates, mother of Brian Cordero, gave accounts of children relegated to homebound instruction or inappropriate classes for long periods of time, even a year, while waiting for appropriate placements.
At the time, the burden fell to local districts to find placements for children whose needs could not be addressed in local public schools. But spaces in state-approved private schools were limited – or nonexistent – in less populated areas of the state. Families faced months of delay while their local districts attempted to find suitable placement.
In Pennsylvania local districts are deemed to be the front-line providers. Individual districts provide special education services, adhering to federal law and a set of state statutes and regulations promulgated by the legislature and the state Board of Education.
In Cordero, the state argued that any delays and violations of the federal law – IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act – was the fault of the districts, not the state.
The lawsuit alleged that this system cast students with disabilities into “education limbo for an extended period,” sometimes receiving only a few hours of instruction per week.
ELC attorneys argued the state failed to meet its obligation to offer a range of education services with varied placement settings, and Judge Sylvia Rambo agreed.
The case established that the state has an unequivocal responsibility to ensure prompt access to a range of placements for children who may need a more complex set of special education supports – and ensure access to a free appropriate education in the least restrictive environment.
In a follow-up 1993 ruling, Judge Rambo ordered the state to track students who cannot find placement, determine areas of the state that lack services, increase availability of appropriate local programs, and ensure coordination between state agencies to improve services. She emphasized that regardless of a local school district’s actions, it is “the state’s obligation to ensure that the systems it put in place are running properly and that if they are not, to correct them.”
After the Cordero decision, ELC attorneys worked with the state agencies for several years on implementing it, helping establish protocols and procedures that are still in effect today.
In the end, the state Department of Education “acknowledged its responsibility to arrange programs and placements for kids whose districts were unable or had failed to do so, through a process called intensive interagency coordination,” recalled Len Rieser, former ELC executive director and one of the attorneys who litigated the case.
The Cordero ruling, he said, came as “a relief to parents – and for that matter districts – that had struggled to find options for kids with complex disabilities.”
In population centers such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, approved private schools – those that meet criteria to receive state funding – often educate students with more serious or particular needs. Still, said Rieser, “the emphasis of the interagency process was on keeping kids in inclusive settings, including local schools, whenever possible.”
