The teacher ran into the Monticello Middle School staff restroom and locked the door. Outside waited the 12-year-old special education student who’d just punched her in the head. At more than 200 pounds, the girl outweighed the petite teacher, and her fist packed a wallop.

It was just the latest in a string of alleged assaults that took place in late September and early October 2008, according to police reports and court records. Over nine days, the 32-year-old special education teacher assigned to instruct the girl one-on-one had been repeatedly punched, shoved, dragged from her seat and pelted with books and other objects.

The teacher called police, who also took a report from another school employee who said the girl had punched her on the arms on several occasions.

What followed was an expensive, extreme example of what school districts sometimes must do to comply with federal special education requirements.

Police referred the girl’s case to juvenile authorities. The girl, though never charged for the assaults due to competency issues, was removed from the school, setting in motion a process that landed her a year ago at a private residential treatment center in Utah for adolescents with emotional or behavioral problems. The facility boasts on its Web site that it is endorsed by Dr. Phil McGraw, the famed television talk show host and Oprah Winfrey confidant.

For the last 13 months, the Longview School district has spent $141,432, or about $12,000 a month, on the girl’s tuition at Youth Care of Utah. How much longer those bills will keep coming is unclear.

The girl is the only student for whom the Longview School District is currently footing the bill to attend school outside the district full time. In the last two years, the district has spent roughly $5,000 on extra programs outside the district for its other special education students.

Special education advocates have fought long and hard for the laws that force local school districts to pay out-of-district tuition for some special education students.

From an advocate’s perspective, spending $141,000 to educate a single child in a year isn’t unreasonable, depending on the circumstances, said Vicky McKinney of Washington PAVE, a nonprofit advocacy group of parents of children with disabilities.

“It’s a sticky wicket, believe me, and we know the schools are up against tremendous odds,” McKinney, director for PAVE’s parent training and information program. “But as a parent of a child with a disability, you can’t really look at budgetary constraints of the school district — you have to be concerned with what is best for your child. … Every parent believes their child is worth every penny.”

If children aren’t properly educated during their formative years, the chance is lost to make them as self-sufficient as possible and help them be productive members of society, McKinney said earlier this month.

“It isn’t until we get that education in place that we can really work on that,” she said. “Our job as parents is to make sure that does happen.”

Court rulings force the issue

Longview’s case represents an expensive example of the lengths school districts must sometimes go to in order to meet federal requirements for special education students.

Of the 1,038,620 students attending public schools statewide, 11 students attended out-of-state special education programs in the 2008-2009 school year, averaging $104,476 in tuition, according to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

But those numbers could rise in the wake of recent court decisions that have made it clear districts have little recourse when it is determined a special education student cannot receive an “appropriate” education within his or her home district.

In fact, a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June about an Oregon case took it one step further by requiring the Forest Grove School District to reimburse parents for the private schooling of a boy who had never been diagnosed with a disability or received special-education services, despite attending public schools from kindergarten through high school. The parents decided the district couldn’t provide their son with the education he needed and enrolled him in a private school.

Parents of special education students and advocacy groups have been relentless in demanding districts meet those federal requirements.

In the case of the Monticello student, her mother is a special education instructor for the district. (To protect the daughter’s identity, The Daily News is not identifying the mother, who declined to be interviewed for this story).

However, according to a police report taken after last year’s alleged assaults, the teacher told police the mother had “great influence” over how the district dealt with her daughter. But district officials deny that the mother’s position in the district had any bearing on how her daughter’s case was handled.

Linda Hahn, the district’s executive director of leadership and learning, said federal and state governments have strict guidelines for serving special education students, and if that process isn’t followed to the letter, the district won’t be reimbursed for the cost.

“It’s in the district’s and the public’s best interest to do the right thing as required by law,” Hahn said last month.

Bill Marshall, Monticello Middle School’s building principal, said he doesn’t think the girl received special treatment because her mother works in the district’s special education department.

“Tough line to walk,” he said. “You want to be appropriate at all times whether they’re an employee or not. They have rights as citizens. Their children have rights as citizens. We all have rights to protect our children in the best way we know how.”

'Free and appropriate education'

Under federal law, school districts are required to provide a “free and appropriate” public education to all children with disabilities living in the district. If the district can’t provide an appropriate education tailored to that child’s specific needs, then it must pay to send the child somewhere that can.

Sometimes those needs can be met in another public school district in Washington. Sometimes districts pay for students’ education at in-state schools such as the Northwest School for Innovative Learning, a non-public alternative program with branches in Tacoma and Kirkland. In rare cases, the children are sent out of state.

State funding for a district’s special education program is based on a percentage of that district’s student population. The maximum funding is 12.7 percent of a district’s population, regardless of how many special education students attend that district.

Public schools in Washington receive about $5,000 per student for basic education, plus another $6,278 for each special education student. That’s a total of $11,278 per special education student, and while that may be more than enough to educate some children, it’s not nearly enough to cover the costs of others with higher needs.

The number of especially high-needs children each district must educate depends solely on who happens to live within the district’s boundaries. It’s a roll of the dice — districts have no way of knowing when a high-needs student who’ll cost tens of thousands of dollars to educate will show up in their territory.

The random nature is clearly demonstrated when districts of comparable size to Longview were surveyed by The Daily News. The Wenatchee School District hasn’t sent any students out of the district in the last two years, whereas Monroe Public Schools spent $552,613 on out-of-district programs for 21 students in 2008-2009.

“If they live in your enrollment area, they’re your responsibility,” said Ron Yauchzee, who was the district’s special education director until August, when his job was eliminated during budget cuts.

Once students have been defined as special education, they are evaluated and given an Individualized Education Program that determines the level of specialized attention they will receive.

In the 2008-2009 school year, the Longview School District had 6,712 students, including 822 special education students from kindergarten through age 21. (By law, the district also is responsible for the special-education needs of children ages birth through pre-K, but those 162 children aren’t included in district enrollment tallies, and their funding comes from a different pot of money.)

Disabilities that qualify a child for special education programs can range from mild speech impairments and reading difficulties to mental retardation, blindness, autism and emotional disturbances. According to Longview School District Superintendent Suzanne Cusick, the “vast majority” of the district’s special education students have less-involved disabilities that require, for instance, seeing a speech language pathologist once a week for 30 minutes or extra help with reading or math.

When state funding isn’t enough to pay for a school’s special education expenses, a district may apply for reimbursement from federal “safety net” funds. That’s what the Longview School District, which had a $8.4 million special education budget last year, did to cover tuition for Youth Care of Utah.

Last year, the district received $450,000 in safety net funding, which included reimbursement for the girl’s Utah tuition, but there are no guarantees. This year, federal stimulus dollars were allocated to districts for special education instead of safety net funding. The district received $1.6 million total in stimulus money for this year and the 2010-2011 school year.

Still, the district does end up spending money from its general fund to cover all the special education programs required by law.

“Yes, it does put a strain on our budget,” Cusick said.

Going to the 'last resort'

District officials say when it’s determined the district can’t meet a child’s educational needs, it places the student in whatever facility is closest to the district that can serve the student best. So how did a Monticello Middle School student wind up in Draper, Utah, nearly 700 miles away?

According to Yauchzee, who was the district’s special education director at the time, sending the girl out of state and splitting up her family was “absolutely” a last resort.

“It was certainly not anything any of us wanted to happen,” said Yauchzee, who now is a special education coordinator in Greeley, Colo., for Weld County School District 6.

The Longview School District had tried many strategies and interventions and even added staff to try to educate the girl, but “it could not be done. It could not be successful,” Yauchzee said earlier this month. What role the alleged assaults and involvement of police played in the process is unclear, though the girl was out of the district within weeks of the police report.

At the district’s request, the girl underwent two medical evaluations “to ferret out what the root cause (of her behavior) was so we could figure out why we had such difficulty educating that on the regular campus,” he said.

No one at the district would disclose the girl’s diagnosis for confidentiality reasons. However, according to what her former teacher told Longview police, the student initially was thought to have emotional behavioral disability, but her mother was in the process of changing her diagnosis to Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. Yauchzee said the medical evaluations narrowed down the girl’s condition even further, but he would not elaborate.

A multi-disciplinary team comprised of the girl’s parents, teachers, school psychologist and others looked at a list of state-approved non-public schools posted on the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s Web site and narrowed them down to three: two Portland-area schools and Youth Care of Utah. Yauchzee visited them in person and the team held telephone conferences with school administrators.

In the end, the team settled upon Youth Care of Utah, partly based on what the facility said it could do for the girl, Yauchzee said. The treatment centers closer to Longview said they weren’t equipped to handle “as intense a situation,” he said, “so we were hoping to get her to a level they could handle and then bring her back.”

Again, citing strict confidentiality requirements, district officials will not say whether the girl has returned to the district. However, the district provided monthly invoice records showing it paid $11,736 to Youth Care this month.

The district’s expenses could have been even higher under a requirement that it pay for any travel expenses related to the girl’s parents visiting the Utah facility as part of her treatment program. No such expenses have been submitted thus far, however.

According to its Web site, www.youthcare.com, Youth Care is a licensed residential treatment facility that teaches troubled teens

“the value of chores, how to interact respectfully and courteously with others, and how to develop and maintain strong, loving relationships.” Students participate in academics and counseling, and privileges are awarded through a points system based on school performance, appropriate social interaction, attitude and adherence to the rules.

Yauchzee said Youth Care is intended for short-term treatment, but the student has been there more than a year now. The goal is to get her back to the district, he said.

McKinney of PAVE emphasized that spending so much money to meet the needs of one special education student is extreme.

“I’ve seen it happen before, but how much did that family have to fight to get that service to be available? … If you take the regular population of special needs people within a school district, very rarely will you ever seen that happen,” she said. “You’re seeing this one extreme case … but we as an advocate see these little cases that the media isn’t necessarily reporting on every day on what families are having to fight for.”

Superintendent Cusick said she didn’t know what the district would do if there were several other special education students requiring as many resources. Other districts that have a greater number of high-cost students than Longview are “really struggling,” she said Friday.

But rather than look at this situation as a question of how much is too much to spend on one child, perhaps communities should consider how to pool their resources and work together to support all children, she said.

“I don’t believe it should all fall back on the schools,” she said.

The Costs

Amount the Longview School District spent in the past year to send one student to a Utah school: $141,432 (as of this month)

Average monthly tuition bill for that student: $11,786

Amount district spent in last two school years for out-of-district special education programs, minus Utah school: $4,976

Source: Longview School District

Amount state school districts spent on out-of district programs in 2008-2009*

Students attending schools out-of-state: 11

Average cost: $104,476

Students attending schools in-state but out-of-district: 264

Average cost: $38,448

Placements within another district: 354

Average cost: $30,493 per student

*These numbers represent the majority of the picture, but there could be settlements and contracts in individual districts that aren’t reported to OSPI.

Source: The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction

Amount spent on out-of district programs in 2008-09 by Kelso and districts of comparable size to Longview**

Kelso (4,722 students): $5,800 for one student (Washington School for the Deaf)

Franklin Pierce Schools — Tacoma (7,801 students): $52,020 for two students (both attended the Northwest School for Innovative Learning)

Average cost per student: $26,010

Moses Lake (7,652 students): $15,000 for one student (for 2.5 months)

Lake Stevens — Everett (7,745 students): $485,000 for 18 students

Highest amount for one student: $99,800 (Northwest School of Innovative Learning)

Average cost per student: $26,944

Monroe (8,143 students): $552,613 for 21 students

Highest amount for one student: $69,100 (Dartmoor School)

Average cost per student: $26,314

Wenatchee (7,728 students): No students sent out of district in last two years.

**Lengths of enrollment during the school year vary from student to student.

Source: Each school district.

The Law

Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, all school-age children with disabilities within the jurisdiction of a school district are entitled to a “free and appropriate public education” (FAPE) tailored to meet their specific individual needs, regardless of the severity of their disability. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that when a school district fails to achieve this, the child’s family is eligible for reimbursement from the school district for private school education expenses.

Source: The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights