PHILADELPHIA — As she tried to determine why her child was struggling to read as an older elementary student, the mother identified flaws with instruction in the Council Rock School District — from curriculum, to a lack of staff trained in a method designed for dyslexic students.
She thought the district would fix the problems. Instead, it agreed to pay for what her child needed — but didn’t change its programs.
“They just want to make me quiet, and for me to go away, and then just continue on,” the mother said.
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The mother, who spoke to The Inquirer on the condition of anonymity because she isn’t allowed to reveal the terms of the settlement she reached with Council Rock, is one of hundreds of Philadelphia-area parents who have made similar deals with school districts after challenging the adequacy of their special education services.
The battles are playing out behind closed doors, waged by lawyers. Critics say school districts are spending millions of dollars to place children in private schools and compensate families for insufficient programs — but often without remedying the deficiencies that led parents to sue in the first place.
School officials and special education lawyers say that in a chronically underfunded special education system — which faces mounting pressures as increasing numbers of children are being identified as requiring services — making sweeping changes can be a daunting, sometimes impossible proposition. Settlement agreements, they say, are often the most cost-effective way to give children what they need.
Yet how exactly the agreements are reached — and what they’re costing taxpayers — is obscured from public view. Close to half the 62 school districts in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties refused to release redacted agreements to The Inquirer, citing federal student privacy protections.
Some districts did provide cost information, including Radnor, Tredyffrin/Easttown, Central Bucks, and Haverford, which all reported awarding more than $5 million in special education settlements over three years, starting in September 2021.
Those costs are why school districts have an interest in keeping agreements private, by including confidentiality provisions that bar parents from disclosing their terms.
It’s “the same kind of value a large corporation would have in settling because of a defective product,” said Andrew Faust, an attorney with the Sweet Stevens law farm, which represents numerous area districts in special education cases. “You don’t want to encourage other lawsuits.”
Parents say it can take an intense, prolonged, and socially isolating fight to get a settlement. Some also say the secretive nature of the agreements allows schools to evade accountability.
“They make an offer to settle, so this never comes to light, and they continue to look good,” said a parent in a Main Line school district who reached a settlement and spoke to The Inquirer on the condition their name and district not be identified, for fear of retaliation. “But they’re not.”
A ‘rich-get-richer’ system
To get a settlement with a school district over special education, first a child has to be identified by the district as requiring services — with an individualized education plan spelling out how the school will meet the student’s needs.
If parents disagree with what a district offers, they can take legal action by filing a due process complaint.
That can trigger formal hearings, which result in public decisions issued by hearing officers. But the vast majority of complaints are resolved through privately negotiated settlements.
As a result, most disputes around special education are happening out of the public eye, with little known about parents’ allegations or what districts are paying out.
“It’s something almost no one knows anything systematic, objective, and complete about,” said Perry Zirkel, a professor emeritus of education and law at Lehigh University.
In the Philadelphia collar counties, where special education-focused law firms have proliferated, lawyers say affluent parents, who know their rights and have the means to hire attorneys, are more likely to sue than poor ones.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — the 1975 federal law entitling students to special education services — has never been fully funded by Congress, leaving schools vulnerable to litigation when they’re strapped to deliver the “free appropriate public education” the law requires, Faust said.
The IDEA is a “very much a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer statute,” Faust said, because unlike other civil rights laws, it relies on parents, not the government, to enforce it.
Even for advantaged parents, though, it takes a high degree of knowledge to sue a school district, said Kate Murphy, a parent and former Tredyffrin/Easttown school board member. Murphy reached an agreement with the district for services for one of her children, who was struggling to read.
At one point, Murphy said, an administrator told her: “Maybe he’s not a reader.”
“It was like they were absolving themselves of the responsibility to teach him,” said Murphy, who had already watched one of her older children struggle. As a board member, she was also hearing complaints from parents that the district’s reading instruction was out of step with the growing science-of-reading movement.
Tredyffrin/Easttown spokesperson Chris Connolly said that hearing officers sided with the district in six due-process cases brought by parents since the 2022-23 school year challenging the district’s reading and language arts programs.
The district works to address each student’s needs and “amicably” reaches agreements about “the appropriate placement and programming for their children,” including private schools and tutoring, Connolly said.
Murphy ultimately pulled her son out of the district, sending him to AIM Academy, a private school for children with language-based learning differences. She subsequently got an agreement.
“I don’t know what normal parents do,” Murphy said, noting that she had time — she wasn’t working — and expertise, from being on the school board.
Despite that, “I still feel like I did something wrong by challenging the school district,” she said.
Significant costs for districts
There can be wide variation in what school districts spend on special education settlements. In the affluent Radnor Township School District, which enrolls 3,600 students, the district reached 76 settlements between September 2021 and August 2024, totaling nearly $6 million, according to district officials. Radnor’s 2025-26 budget for special education is $7.2 million, including settlement costs.
“Our settlements are not reflective of systemic issues within our district’s special education program,” said Radnor spokesperson Theji Brennan. “Rather, they often reflect a mutual decision by both parties to resolve a matter efficiently and privately, without increased taxpayer expense or extended timeline of litigation or exposure of our families.”
In the poorer Coatesville Area School District — which has 2,500 students enrolled in district schools — there were 18 settlements, costing $460,000, over that same period.
Neither district provided The Inquirer with their settlement agreements, but were among a handful of districts that supplied the number of agreements and their costs.
The Inquirer did not seek agreements from Philadelphia, given the district’s size. A lawyer for the district said it had 2,473 settlements during the three years; costs were not readily available.
Agreements don’t offer specifics about a child’s disability, and don’t provide a full picture of what school districts are paying. In many cases, schools offer “compensatory education,” providing money that families can use for tutoring, therapy, and other services. The money is typically held by districts until families seek reimbursement, and sometimes they don’t fully use it, according to lawyers.
In other cases, districts agree to pay a student’s private school tuition, or a portion of it. Some settlements specify the price of that tuition, but others do not.
Still, the records reflect significant costs. The Pennsbury School District, for instance, agreed to pay $767,000 for a student to attend a private school over five years; three other agreements included costs ranging from $300,000 to $400,000.
Settlements can include tuition for out-of-state schools. The Unionville-Chadds Ford School District agreed to pay $121,000 for a student’s tuition and services at a Utah school that offers residential treatment; it also committed $200,000 to send a student to a Connecticut boarding school targeting children with ADHD and dyslexia.
John Sanville, who retired in July as Unionville-Chadds Ford’s superintendent, said those placements were likely due to “specific needs.”
“You do a cost-benefit analysis: Is it more important to win, in a due-process situation? Or is it more important to settle a disagreement?” Sanville said.
If a parent prevails in a due-process hearing, the district must pay their attorneys’ fees — which can be “extensive,” Sanville said, and that incentivizes districts to settle. (Settlements often also include agreements by districts to pay some attorneys’ fees.)
Faust, who represents several districts, said there was “no question that settlements are costing the districts a lot of money.”
“It really comes down to a hard economic decision. It’s not a kid-based decision, and that’s sad,” he said.
Battles between parents and districts
School districts differ in their willingness to award private-school tuition, said Maria Vetter, an advocate for students with disabilities who has also worked in districts. If a student is young and seeking a placement, districts will consider how long they might be responsible for those costs, Vetter said.
Some districts consider how many students they’re already paying to attend a given private school and may not want to place another child there, despite a family’s request, she said.
But districts can be motivated to send a student elsewhere if they “know a family will fight, year after year,” Vetter said.
Lawyers say certain districts are also more likely to battle. “The more economically advantaged the school district, the more they will fight,” said Daniel Cooper, a lawyer who represents parents in special education disputes across the region.
In Council Rock, Roy Rakszawski said he faced fierce resistance from administrators and felt the district rejected his requests for placement without seriously considering the facts of his children’s cases.
Parents often have to place their children in private school at their own expense, hire a lawyer, and “hope for the best,” said Rakszawski, who said he’s spoken with other district families with similar experiences.
“No parent should have to work that hard, and risk that much, to get what their child needs,” Rakszawski said. He reached a settlement with Council Rock but isn’t allowed to disclose the terms.
A superintendent himself in central Pennsylvania, Rakszawski said he tried to track how often Council Rock reaches settlements, but what appears on school board agendas isn’t always clear. The district did not provide records to The Inquirer.
A spokesperson said Council Rock “prides itself on providing exceptional support and educational opportunities for all students, including those with special needs,” and that the vast majority of families were satisfied.
“There are myriad reasons why families and districts seek and enter into agreements,” and most don’t reflect failures in district programming, said the spokesperson, Andrea Mangold.
At a school board meeting in March, Council Rock solicitor Peter Amuso said there were more than 20 pending settlements, and “30 to 40 active” special education cases.
The month before, Amuso told school board members that Council Rock’s settlement costs in 2023 under a prior law firm had topped $2 million, along with more than $256,000 in fees to district lawyers. In 2024, meanwhile, settlement costs were just over $500,000, but the district paid nearly $490,000 in legal fees.
“These lower costs are the result of more work,” Amuso said.
A necessary option, or a ‘Band-Aid’?
The Main Line parent who spoke to The Inquirer on the condition of anonymity placed their child in a private school — away from friends, and a top-ranked district — without knowing if they would get a settlement.
“If you don’t have the money to pull your kid out, and send them somewhere, for 50 grand a year, what do you do?” the parent said, noting that parents have to meticulously track everything they spend in order to get reimbursed.
Even if parents want their districts to make systemic changes, they can feel forced to settle, because after years of fighting, “you just want it to be over,” the parent said.
Lawyers acknowledged parental frustration, but said settlements represent the best outcome for many children, barring a significant infusion of funding.
“Even if we had all the money in the world … there’s a serious question of whether we could find the people,” Faust said, noting shortages of special education staff.
Vetter, the parents’ advocate, said that while there’s inequity in the settlement system, “there’s inequity all over the place.” Schools, especially wealthier districts, are often reluctant to admit wrongdoing, she said.
Without settlements, it would “hurt a lot of kids’ ability to get to the right programs,” Vetter said.
Parents like the Council Rock mother say their districts are resisting change.
Council Rock teachers union minutes from 2024 indicate teachers sought training in the Wilson Reading System, a program aimed at struggling readers, but the district denied it.
“The district’s answer seems to be to allow parents to hire outside trained individuals to teach students during the school day,” according to April 2024 minutes. In minutes the next month, a union representative said there was “too little training” on special education and reading programs: “Teachers are given a book and asked to train themselves.” (Mangold said the minutes were “outside of the purview of district administration to comment on.”)
As she asked more questions, the mother said, she learned her child’s teachers were using a curriculum that wasn’t evidence-based, but something created by another teacher. Her child had been identified as needing intensive support, yet teachers hadn’t been trained in a program that could help, the mother said.
Taking legal action, and getting a settlement, was “an absolute last resort” after negotiation with the district failed, she said.
“They don’t want to actually fix this,” she said. “They just want to put a Band-Aid on it … even though they’re really not providing legally what they should, and what the kids really need.”
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