Special Education Law Blog

A Complete Breakdown in Support Systems in Sandy Hook Tragedy

The Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate has just released the results of its exhaustive study of the December 2012 horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which left 20 children and six educators murdered along with the shooter and his mother.  While the report recognizes the “ubiquitous” presence of guns as a causal factor, it carefully states that it is not assigning blame on any one individual or institution in its review.  Additionally, the report stresses that individuals with autism or such mental health issues as OCD and crippling anxiety, all diagnoses which Adam Lanza possessed, do not inherently become mass murderers.  When these conditions go untreated, however, they can still be destructive to the individual, the family, and the community.  The report is a sad, lengthy treatise depicting numerous lost opportunities and failures to communicate and coordinate care among the school system, parents, pediatrician, community psychiatrist, emergency room, and ultimately the Yale Child Study Center, which raised an urgent alarm about Adam Lanza’s deteriorating mental health—an alarm that went unanswered and unconsidered in Adam’s subsequent IEPs. The school district was overly focused on meeting Adam’s perceived curricular needs and not his urgent mental health needs.  Though the Child Advocate report clearly states that “no direct line of causation can be drawn” from the lapses and the ultimate mass murder, lessons clearly must be learned from this tragedy.

Schools Must Ensure that Web-based Content is Accessible

The issue of accessibility of web-based content is fairly new, given that the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 pre-date the internet boom and the growth of innumerable emerging technologies that school districts are rapidly incorporating into their educational programs today. But as more and more schools adopt online learning, as enrollment in virtual schools increases, and as complaints from students with disabilities escalate, it is becomingly increasingly clear that schools need to determine the accessibility of new technologies before their adoption. Accessibility should not be an afterthought.