Austin School District Caves: Settles Lawsuit with Disability Rights Texas

In a classic case of government inefficiency, the Austin school district has finally thrown in the towel and settled a 2021 lawsuit with Disability Rights Texas. The district's school board voted Thursday to wave the white flag, but neither side had spilled the beans on the settlement details by Friday.

This surrender comes as the district scrambles to meet a September 2023 order from the Texas Education Agency (TEA), which called them out for dragging their feet on special education evaluations and services.

The district and Disability Rights Texas issued a joint statement, saying they're "pleased" to reach an agreement and are now waiting for the court's final blessing.

In the original lawsuit, filed back in March 2021, Disability Rights Texas accused the district of dropping the ball on serving five students with disabilities due to a massive backlog of evaluation requests. Federal law dictates that once a parent requests an evaluation, the district must finish it within a strict timeline.

Austin, however, had been sitting on hundreds of overdue evaluations for years, blaming staffing issues and data collection snafus. In September, TEA stepped in and appointed a monitor—the least severe form of state intervention—to keep the district in check.

The TEA order laid out an aggressive plan for the district to clear the backlog, update data systems, train staff, and provide additional services to students who filed complaints. Since then, the district has made some headway, reducing overdue evaluations from 1,780 in January 2023 to 306 by December.

But the question remains: Why did it take a lawsuit and state intervention for the district to start doing its job? Stay tuned for more on this bureaucratic blunder.