Help Mareena

Los Alamitos Unified School District owes a family’s legal team as much as $150,000 after a judge ruled that their 8-year-old daughter’s behavioral problems were not adequately addressed by school staff, impacting the quality of education to which children with special needs are entitled.

 

However, Martin and Deena Flores said this week that they are hardly celebrating their district’s hefty bill. The couple, who also have a 10-year-old son, worry that some people will resent the family for taking money from the small district as the result of a lawsuit of last resort.  “I’m concerned that other parents will view us as having invisible price tags over our heads,” said Deena Flores, 37, a sales representative for a technology services company. “We did not want to go to war with the district, but being nice wasn’t working.”

 

In April, the couple filed a lawsuit claiming the district exacerbated daughter Mareena’s hurdles by failing to adequately evaluate and address her challenges stemming from seizures and brain surgery. The suit listed numerous issues – including assertions that her school did not offer satisfactory speech and language services or sufficiently trained aides – each of which the district denied in its response.  Earlier this month, after a three-week hearing, California Administrative Law Judge Paul H. Kamoroff released a decision that finds merit on both sides of the argument.

 

On the whole, Kamoroff found that the district’s “offer of placement, services, personnel and assessments constituted a FAPE” – that is, a “free appropriate public education” as stipulated by the Individuals with Disabilities Act.

 

But he agreed with the family on three of the major issues concerning Mareena’s behavioral problems, and thus a denail of FAPE, stating that she “required a prescribed behavior support plan based upon a formal behavior assessment.”  The family’s representative in court, James D. Peter, a paralegal with a law firm that focuses on special education, said, “The student only has to prevail on one issue to ‘win.’”

 

District officials declined to comment on the decision.  “We do not comment on issues involving specific children as we respect the privacy of individual young people,” said LAUSD Superintendent Sherry Kropp.  “It’s bittersweet,” said Deena Flores. “Mareena lost two years of her education.”

 

SURGERY THE ONLY OPTION

 

Mareena started falling behind as a toddler. She spent many waking hours in seizures or recovering from seizures – all the while under heavy medication.

 

“It made her a zombie,” her mother said. “But even with medication, we never fully controlled the seizures. She would have from five to 20 a day. She missed her own birthday parties, she missed Christmas mornings.”  Mareena’s parents took her to numerous specialists, including doctors at Stanford and UCLA, in search of answers. “No one could pinpoint anything,” said Martin Flores, 38, a financial planner.

 

Finally, Mary Zupanc, an epileptologist at the Children’s Hospital of Orange, identified the culprit as a “dead” zone in Mareena’s left temporal lobe that caused her brain to misfire.  In May of 2012, neurological surgeon Richard Kim removed the unresponsive section of her brain.  “It was the scariest day of my life,” Martin Flores said. “We didn’t even know if she would recognize us when she woke up. But doing nothing was not an option.”

 

LOST IN TRANSLATION

 

To their great relief, the parents discovered that Mareena’s memory remained in tact – and her seizures subsided. Three months later, she started kindergarten at Rossmoor Elementary with her post-surgery buzz cut.

 

Still, Mareena struggled with math concepts, expressive speech and reading comprehension. She repeated kindergarten the following year.  “She’s lost in translation,” Martin Flores said in an attempt to explain his daughter’s deficit. “I speak Spanish. There are just some ideas that don’t translate well into English, and vice versa. It’s like that for her – she can’t always translate her thoughts.

 

“Mareena is a miracle, but she is a miracle who is missing one-fourth of her brain.” Mareena looks like any other child on the playground. She is a natural athlete who enjoys rollerskating, doing somersaults on the trampoline and climbing high on jungle gyms.  “If it wasn’t for our perseverance, she would just slip through the cracks as a low-performing student,” Deena Flores said.

 

As the girl’s second stint in kindergarten progressed, her parents determined that she needed more assistance than she was receiving.

The couple briefly considered enrolling Mareena in a special day class at the district’s McGaugh Elementary in Seal Beach.  “We went to observe it,” Deena Flores said. “Out of seven kids, five didn’t talk at all. Mareena didn’t fit that mold.”

 

Complicating her learning disabilities, Mareena occasionally throws tantrums and refuses to follow rules at school.  “The aides are wonderful people but they don’t have the training for Mareena’s specific needs,” Martin Flores said. “Their main role seemed to be to keep Mareena from interfering with the teacher’s lesson. She figured out pretty quickly how to manipulate them.”

 

In its response to the lawsuit, the district argued that Mareena “made significant behavioral progress,” showing “there is no indication that additional ... training (for aides) was necessary.”

 

BITTERSWEET CONCLUSION

 

From the parents’ perspective, Los Alamitos Unified ignored even their most basic request – an independent assessment of their daughter that would provide guidance for her education.  “We’ve spent thousands on therapists and tutors,” Deena Flores said. “It’s not like we were asking for a handout. We were only asking for what the law provides us – not just services, but appropriate services.”  Any sense of victory for the couple is muted by lingering wounds from their emotional dispute. After all, they said, Los Alamitos Unified is what attracted them to their neighborhood in the first place. Both children will attend Rossmoor Elementary again this fall – Mareena in second grade and son Dean in fifth.

 

“It’s a fantastic school district with fantastic teachers – if you have a ‘normal’ kid,” Martin Flores said. “But God forbid you have a child with special needs. You’re made to feel it’s you against them.”  “We’ve lost our trust in the district,” Deena added. “It’s sad it had to come to this.”