Suit alleges students abused - Parents of seven Clover Park special-education students seek damages. A lawsuit accuses teachers and aides in the Clover Park School District of harassing and abusing seven special-education students.

By Debby Abe

Seven special-education students and their parents have sued the Clover Park School District, alleging the youths suffered harassment, physical abuse and discrimination at the hands of district teachers and aides.

The Pierce County Superior Court lawsuit filed in June seeks unspecified monetary damages and a court order that the district take steps to ensure developmentally delayed students are safe from mistreatment.

Meanwhile, two more students and their parents also have filed claims against the district, and are expected to join the lawsuit.

Most of the allegations center on the treatment of severely developmentally delayed students at Lakes High School the past three school years, though some incidents date to the mid-1990s.

"This lawsuit will send a clear message to school districts in Pierce County, Washington state and the entire country that the most vulnerable among us deserve equal treatment and dignity," said Thaddeus Martin, the parents' attorney.

Clover Park lawyer Bill Coats declined to comment on the lawsuit. But he said the district has been investigating the allegations since the first group of parents filed a "tort claim" - the required prelude to a lawsuit against a school district - in April.

"We're preparing our defense," Coats said. "The allegations are rather extensive."

Earlier, district officials said that before the first tort claim was filed, they investigated allegations they knew about and took appropriate action in those they found to have merit. However, they declined to specify which allegations they examined and which were substantiated.

Lakewood police investigated one of the complaints of a Lakes special-education teacher accused of assaulting a student, including slamming him into a locker. City prosecutors said the teacher's actions didn't rise to the level of a prosecutable crime.

The families bringing the lawsuit are Mitch and In Cha Dowler and their son Nam Su Chong; Kathleen Davis and her children, Zachary and Alexias; Melanie Stevens and her son Vance; Derrick and Judith Vollmer and their son Joshua; Nicole Schueneman-Dobrinski and her son Conner; William and Yolanda Sullivan and their daughter Stephanie.

The two other families that recently filed tort claims against the district are Lisa Titchell and her daughter Christina Echevarria and Jeanette Moye and her son Ralshodd.

Though the lawsuit does not specify a monetary amount, the initial claim sought $12 million against the Lakewood-area district.

Attorney Martin stressed that the parents' desire to end discrimination of students is just as significant as their monetary request.

Their lawsuit asks the court to require Clover Park to institute at least 10 measures to eliminate "any hostile learning environment."

Among the requests: requiring annual sensitivity training for staff members who work with developmentally disabled students, anger management counseling for staff members who discriminate against those students, and creation of a process to investigate within one week complaints of mistreatment.

District officials stress that federal law already provides extensive means to address family concerns about special-education students' treatment and education.

They also say Clover Park has worked in recent years to improve instruction and services for special-education students, ranging from better compliance with "individual education plans" to adding more vocational training opportunities.

The lawsuit and recent tort claims allege at least three dozen examples, mostly in Lakes' "life skills" program, of teacher aides and two special-education teachers:

• Calling students names such as brat or stinky boy and ridiculing them over their looks or menstrual periods.
• Yanking, shoving and assaulting students.
• Ignoring education needs of the most severely disabled students, repeatedly showing them the same movies and teachers leaving the classroom to aides for hours at a time.

The lawsuit and one of the recent tort claims also allege two students were sexually assaulted in separate incidents by classmates.

"I have never heard of any school district that has had so many consistent complaints about the treatment of disabled students," said Martin, who was among the lawyers who sued the Puyallup School District in 2000 alleging racial discrimination. "For years, the parents tried everything else to get the district's attention and gave the district every opportunity to do the right thing and treat their children with basic human respect."

"Someone had referred me to Thad and from the beginning I felt very comfortable with him...The insurance company never offered a reasonable amount for my injuries so that took the case to trial and we got the largest slip and fall verdict ever in Washington State."

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