CamEdwards
05-20-2008, 05:38 PM
I can't believe this story.
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_1phobia.6371961may18,0,6721645,print.story
Rebecca Maykish is 17 and dreads school so much that she stopped going regularly.
In fourth grade.
Those days off have come at a price to her school district and the Palmerton taxpayers who support it. Since 2004, the Palmerton Area School Board has authorized payments of more than $45,000 to help Rebecca make up for her missed school days. Rebecca's mother, Barbara, has used the money for at-home tutoring and education software purchases. She has also spent it on modeling classes for Rebecca, subscriptions to teen magazines, and travel to New York and Toronto with a summer camp.
All of the expenses were approved by the district.
Until December, Rebecca's education was paid through a compensatory education fund, which is supported through local property taxes and controlled by the school board. Compensatory education funds are distributed to students whose school districts have failed to give them an appropriate education, as required by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
Compensatory education fund
In 2004, a special education hearing officer with the state ordered the district to set up a compensatory education fund for Rebecca, according to Fred Stanczak, Barbara Maykish's attorney. Maykish and Palmerton Area school officials agreed in a private meeting to compensate Rebecca for 1,000 hours of missed instruction, at a rate of $45 an hour, Stanczak said.
The agreement allowed Barbara Maykish to spend the money on anything that would be educational, therapeutic or enriching, which gave her wide discretion, Stanczak said. The fund hit the $45,000 cap in December.
State education officials say they have no control over compensatory education funds and do not know how many exist. The Allentown District has a $57,000 fund set up for a special education student, said Superintendent Karen Angello. She would not disclose the nature of the student's need but did say the district has never set up a compensatory education fund for a student with school phobia.
The Bethlehem Area and Easton Area districts currently have no compensatory education funds in their budgets.
Scott Engler, special education director for the Palmerton district, said school officials had little say over how the money in Rebecca Maykish's fund was spent.
''The expenditures were paid under the terms of an order that gave virtually total discretion to the parent to determine what was educationally necessary,'' he said.
Last spring, about seven months before Rebecca Maykish's fund ran out, she left a California boarding school that she had attended for part of the 2006-07 school year. The district followed up with truancy notices.
Since then, Rebecca has been fined $1,900 and her mother $11,329 for truancy. In March, a district judge ordered Barbara Maykish to pay $8,000 for the 80 days that Rebecca missed this year.
''It's been really bad. I have my house for sale (to pay the fines) ... (But) when she did go to school, she would cry nonstop,'' Maykish said as she sat in the living room of her Lehigh Avenue home with her two Japanese Chin lap dogs and a Boston terrier nearby.
Rebecca says she's not lazy, but the thought of going to school has made her sick with anxiety. So she has just stayed home.
A 'long-standing' phobia
According to a psychiatrist and psychologists who have evaluated her, she suffers from an emotional disorder called school phobia, or school refusal.
In 2004, an Orefield psychiatrist noted in a report -- which Barbara Maykish shared with the The Morning Call -- that Rebecca had a ''generalized anxiety disorder'' that made her fear school.
''This is a young lady who has long-standing school phobia,'' wrote Dr. Larry Dumont, who recommended that Rebecca receive at-home instruction.
School phobia is a medical condition but is not one of 13 federally approved disabilities that allow a student to qualify for an individualized education program under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, said Rick Agretto, the director of special education for the Bethlehem Area School District.
However, a student with school phobia could qualify for some accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, including a compensatory education fund.
When the final bills were tallied, the fund set up for Rebecca had reached $46,361. All the money paid to her came from district funds, said Steve Serfass, Palmerton Area School District solicitor.
Barbara Maykish spent $3,892 on at-home instruction, and hundreds more on educational software. She spent $2,100 for Rebecca to take classes at the Barbizon modeling academy, and nearly $6,000 to attend summer camp in Ferndale, N.Y., and go on field trips to Toronto and New York. The fund also covered $54 for subscriptions to Seventeen, Teen Vogue and Teen People magazines, according to documents provided by Maykish and the school district.
The documents show Barbara Maykish spent $222 to board her dogs while visiting Rebecca at a California boarding school in 2007; $2,329 for her and Rebecca to fly to the school and $500 for tuition and spending from March-May.
All of the expenses were allowed under the agreement Barbara Maykish reached with the school district.
Barbara Maykish never received cash up front. Instead, she would purchase items and submit a receipt to the school district for reimbursement.
Stanley J. Majewski Jr, assistant superintendent for finance in the Bethlehem Area district, said the district has had few special education cases that have required the funds. None, he said, has included the kinds of expenses Rebecca Maykish has accumulated.,
''I've not seen anything come through for such things as [magazine] subscriptions,'' Majewski said.
Palmerton School Board President Carl Bieling Jr. said he and the board approved the payments because district administrators told them they were permitted under the terms of the compensatory education fund. He added that the expenses were first approved by former members of the board.
But he said he was bothered that Rebecca and her mother were receiving so much money.
''We are aware of the case, we are aware of the California thing. ... We've been advised that these expenditures were needed under the circumstance,'' Bieling said.
''It is troubling to see monies go out to one student that could have been used across the whole district,'' he said.
Acting Superintendent Lamar Snyder did not return repeated calls.
Compensatory education funds are typically set up to help students who have not received appropriate instruction in the classroom. They usually fund tutoring, according to Charles Pugh, an attorney with Education Law Advocates in West Chester, Chester County. The funds can also be used to help students with emotional or behavioral development, providing such things as psychological care or speech therapy. Or for equipment purchases that help a child with a physical disability, Pugh said.
Justified expenses?
Barbara Maykish said expenses for modeling school and summer camp were justified because the education fund was also intended to boost Rebecca's self-esteem and help her interact with kids her age.
At the beginning of most school years, Rebecca has tried to attend school but the longest she has made it was toThanksgiving in fourth grade. She began this year as a junior at Palmerton High School but stopped going after the third week of September.
''It's kind of humiliating to start out at the beginning of the year,'' Rebecca said. ''People always say 'Didn't you used to go to this school? What happened?' ''
Rebecca says she reads for pleasure, enjoying parodies such as ''Zen of the Zombie,'' a mock self-improvement book. But her writing skills are weak and she can only do basic multiplication and division on downloaded worksheets. She estimates she spends three hours a day learning. Barbara Maykish has opted not to homeschool her, saying she worried that she would not be able to help Rebecca with her math and writing problems.
Rebecca said she has only one friend in Palmerton. She spent her 17th birthday in March with her mother, who is her only close companion. Her father lives in Peru.
When Rebecca was a kindergartner, she would grip the bannister in her home to keep from going to school, Barbara Maykish said.
''You would have to peel her fingers off the railing. It would take two people,'' she said.
For the first couple of years, Barbara Maykish said, she would force her daughter to go to school. But Rebecca would cry, shake, and throw up in the mornings.
Some elementary school students get that kind of separation anxiety, but it is almost never seen among teens, said Elna Yadin, a psychologist at the Child Study Institute at Bryn Mawr College.
In his 16 years as special education director, Agretto, of the Bethlehem Area district, said he may have seen 10 cases of school phobia, most of them involving elementary school students.
''It comes in all levels of degree,'' Agretto said. ''You have to take each case on face value.''
School phobia, which
affects between 1 percent and 5 percent of students, is often associated with other anxiety problems or depression,
according to a 2003 report in American Family Physician by Dr. Wanda B. Fremont, a psychiatry professor at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University. Children with school phobia usually stay in their house during school hours because it is considered a safe and secure environment and are willing to do schoolwork at home, while truants are likely to be out of the house and have no interest in doing school work, Fremont wrote.
Rebecca is an extreme case of school phobia, according to Yadin and Palmerton school officials, who say they have never had a truancy case like this.
Typically, it develops when a student has a reason to dread school, such as a bully, a mean teacher, or a fear that something bad will happen if they leave the house, said Yadin. Once the cause is known, school officials and parents can usually find a way to address it.
''If you teach kids to stay away from what you're afraid of, that is not a good solution in the long term,'' Yadin said. ''Avoidance becomes a way of life.''
Palmerton sent tutors to Rebecca's house during the 2004-05 school year. Barbara and Rebecca Maykish said they got along with one tutor, calling her ''phenomenal,'' but did not like the tutor who replaced her. They disagreed over appointment times, and Rebecca felt the tutor was not working with her. Tutoring stopped the following year.
In November of 2006, Rebecca enrolled at the Academy of the Sierras, a boarding school in California. Rebecca said being immersed in a school environment helped her anxiety, and she made friends and went to classes. But the school phobia soon returned, and she left around April 2007.
When Rebecca came home, she and her mother had no plan for her education. Palmerton school officials tried to work out a new individualized education plan for her, but Barbara Maykish and school officials could not reach an agreement.
That's when the fines started arriving again. Barbara Maykish has been fined 111 times for truancy, with the earliest cases filed in 2003, a year before the compensatory education fund was set up.
She fought the fines, but has lost every case in Palmerton district court, and 10 appeals so far in Carbon County. Maykish, who is unemployed, has paid $1 so far. State law allows a jail term of five days for each unpaid fine, although no judge has threatened jail yet, said Serfass, the school district solicitor.
Payment schedules call for her to pay about $35 a month through the year 2037.
Maykish plans to appeal to federal court, arguing that Rebecca cannot be expected to go to a regular school.
Her attorney, Stanczak, said the local courts have ignored Rebecca's disability. He said Palmerton has not accommodated her.
''This is an unusual disability and it's not something that schools are used to dealing with,'' he said.
Now that she is 17, Rebecca could legally drop out, but she says she wants to earn a diploma. She can attend Palmerton Area High School until she is 21, but she thinks a cyberschool or another boarding school would be better options.
Because her daughter has gone the past year without any formal education, Barbara Maykish said she thinks she might need another compensatory education fund.
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_1phobia.6371961may18,0,6721645,print.story
Rebecca Maykish is 17 and dreads school so much that she stopped going regularly.
In fourth grade.
Those days off have come at a price to her school district and the Palmerton taxpayers who support it. Since 2004, the Palmerton Area School Board has authorized payments of more than $45,000 to help Rebecca make up for her missed school days. Rebecca's mother, Barbara, has used the money for at-home tutoring and education software purchases. She has also spent it on modeling classes for Rebecca, subscriptions to teen magazines, and travel to New York and Toronto with a summer camp.
All of the expenses were approved by the district.
Until December, Rebecca's education was paid through a compensatory education fund, which is supported through local property taxes and controlled by the school board. Compensatory education funds are distributed to students whose school districts have failed to give them an appropriate education, as required by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
Compensatory education fund
In 2004, a special education hearing officer with the state ordered the district to set up a compensatory education fund for Rebecca, according to Fred Stanczak, Barbara Maykish's attorney. Maykish and Palmerton Area school officials agreed in a private meeting to compensate Rebecca for 1,000 hours of missed instruction, at a rate of $45 an hour, Stanczak said.
The agreement allowed Barbara Maykish to spend the money on anything that would be educational, therapeutic or enriching, which gave her wide discretion, Stanczak said. The fund hit the $45,000 cap in December.
State education officials say they have no control over compensatory education funds and do not know how many exist. The Allentown District has a $57,000 fund set up for a special education student, said Superintendent Karen Angello. She would not disclose the nature of the student's need but did say the district has never set up a compensatory education fund for a student with school phobia.
The Bethlehem Area and Easton Area districts currently have no compensatory education funds in their budgets.
Scott Engler, special education director for the Palmerton district, said school officials had little say over how the money in Rebecca Maykish's fund was spent.
''The expenditures were paid under the terms of an order that gave virtually total discretion to the parent to determine what was educationally necessary,'' he said.
Last spring, about seven months before Rebecca Maykish's fund ran out, she left a California boarding school that she had attended for part of the 2006-07 school year. The district followed up with truancy notices.
Since then, Rebecca has been fined $1,900 and her mother $11,329 for truancy. In March, a district judge ordered Barbara Maykish to pay $8,000 for the 80 days that Rebecca missed this year.
''It's been really bad. I have my house for sale (to pay the fines) ... (But) when she did go to school, she would cry nonstop,'' Maykish said as she sat in the living room of her Lehigh Avenue home with her two Japanese Chin lap dogs and a Boston terrier nearby.
Rebecca says she's not lazy, but the thought of going to school has made her sick with anxiety. So she has just stayed home.
A 'long-standing' phobia
According to a psychiatrist and psychologists who have evaluated her, she suffers from an emotional disorder called school phobia, or school refusal.
In 2004, an Orefield psychiatrist noted in a report -- which Barbara Maykish shared with the The Morning Call -- that Rebecca had a ''generalized anxiety disorder'' that made her fear school.
''This is a young lady who has long-standing school phobia,'' wrote Dr. Larry Dumont, who recommended that Rebecca receive at-home instruction.
School phobia is a medical condition but is not one of 13 federally approved disabilities that allow a student to qualify for an individualized education program under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, said Rick Agretto, the director of special education for the Bethlehem Area School District.
However, a student with school phobia could qualify for some accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, including a compensatory education fund.
When the final bills were tallied, the fund set up for Rebecca had reached $46,361. All the money paid to her came from district funds, said Steve Serfass, Palmerton Area School District solicitor.
Barbara Maykish spent $3,892 on at-home instruction, and hundreds more on educational software. She spent $2,100 for Rebecca to take classes at the Barbizon modeling academy, and nearly $6,000 to attend summer camp in Ferndale, N.Y., and go on field trips to Toronto and New York. The fund also covered $54 for subscriptions to Seventeen, Teen Vogue and Teen People magazines, according to documents provided by Maykish and the school district.
The documents show Barbara Maykish spent $222 to board her dogs while visiting Rebecca at a California boarding school in 2007; $2,329 for her and Rebecca to fly to the school and $500 for tuition and spending from March-May.
All of the expenses were allowed under the agreement Barbara Maykish reached with the school district.
Barbara Maykish never received cash up front. Instead, she would purchase items and submit a receipt to the school district for reimbursement.
Stanley J. Majewski Jr, assistant superintendent for finance in the Bethlehem Area district, said the district has had few special education cases that have required the funds. None, he said, has included the kinds of expenses Rebecca Maykish has accumulated.,
''I've not seen anything come through for such things as [magazine] subscriptions,'' Majewski said.
Palmerton School Board President Carl Bieling Jr. said he and the board approved the payments because district administrators told them they were permitted under the terms of the compensatory education fund. He added that the expenses were first approved by former members of the board.
But he said he was bothered that Rebecca and her mother were receiving so much money.
''We are aware of the case, we are aware of the California thing. ... We've been advised that these expenditures were needed under the circumstance,'' Bieling said.
''It is troubling to see monies go out to one student that could have been used across the whole district,'' he said.
Acting Superintendent Lamar Snyder did not return repeated calls.
Compensatory education funds are typically set up to help students who have not received appropriate instruction in the classroom. They usually fund tutoring, according to Charles Pugh, an attorney with Education Law Advocates in West Chester, Chester County. The funds can also be used to help students with emotional or behavioral development, providing such things as psychological care or speech therapy. Or for equipment purchases that help a child with a physical disability, Pugh said.
Justified expenses?
Barbara Maykish said expenses for modeling school and summer camp were justified because the education fund was also intended to boost Rebecca's self-esteem and help her interact with kids her age.
At the beginning of most school years, Rebecca has tried to attend school but the longest she has made it was toThanksgiving in fourth grade. She began this year as a junior at Palmerton High School but stopped going after the third week of September.
''It's kind of humiliating to start out at the beginning of the year,'' Rebecca said. ''People always say 'Didn't you used to go to this school? What happened?' ''
Rebecca says she reads for pleasure, enjoying parodies such as ''Zen of the Zombie,'' a mock self-improvement book. But her writing skills are weak and she can only do basic multiplication and division on downloaded worksheets. She estimates she spends three hours a day learning. Barbara Maykish has opted not to homeschool her, saying she worried that she would not be able to help Rebecca with her math and writing problems.
Rebecca said she has only one friend in Palmerton. She spent her 17th birthday in March with her mother, who is her only close companion. Her father lives in Peru.
When Rebecca was a kindergartner, she would grip the bannister in her home to keep from going to school, Barbara Maykish said.
''You would have to peel her fingers off the railing. It would take two people,'' she said.
For the first couple of years, Barbara Maykish said, she would force her daughter to go to school. But Rebecca would cry, shake, and throw up in the mornings.
Some elementary school students get that kind of separation anxiety, but it is almost never seen among teens, said Elna Yadin, a psychologist at the Child Study Institute at Bryn Mawr College.
In his 16 years as special education director, Agretto, of the Bethlehem Area district, said he may have seen 10 cases of school phobia, most of them involving elementary school students.
''It comes in all levels of degree,'' Agretto said. ''You have to take each case on face value.''
School phobia, which
affects between 1 percent and 5 percent of students, is often associated with other anxiety problems or depression,
according to a 2003 report in American Family Physician by Dr. Wanda B. Fremont, a psychiatry professor at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University. Children with school phobia usually stay in their house during school hours because it is considered a safe and secure environment and are willing to do schoolwork at home, while truants are likely to be out of the house and have no interest in doing school work, Fremont wrote.
Rebecca is an extreme case of school phobia, according to Yadin and Palmerton school officials, who say they have never had a truancy case like this.
Typically, it develops when a student has a reason to dread school, such as a bully, a mean teacher, or a fear that something bad will happen if they leave the house, said Yadin. Once the cause is known, school officials and parents can usually find a way to address it.
''If you teach kids to stay away from what you're afraid of, that is not a good solution in the long term,'' Yadin said. ''Avoidance becomes a way of life.''
Palmerton sent tutors to Rebecca's house during the 2004-05 school year. Barbara and Rebecca Maykish said they got along with one tutor, calling her ''phenomenal,'' but did not like the tutor who replaced her. They disagreed over appointment times, and Rebecca felt the tutor was not working with her. Tutoring stopped the following year.
In November of 2006, Rebecca enrolled at the Academy of the Sierras, a boarding school in California. Rebecca said being immersed in a school environment helped her anxiety, and she made friends and went to classes. But the school phobia soon returned, and she left around April 2007.
When Rebecca came home, she and her mother had no plan for her education. Palmerton school officials tried to work out a new individualized education plan for her, but Barbara Maykish and school officials could not reach an agreement.
That's when the fines started arriving again. Barbara Maykish has been fined 111 times for truancy, with the earliest cases filed in 2003, a year before the compensatory education fund was set up.
She fought the fines, but has lost every case in Palmerton district court, and 10 appeals so far in Carbon County. Maykish, who is unemployed, has paid $1 so far. State law allows a jail term of five days for each unpaid fine, although no judge has threatened jail yet, said Serfass, the school district solicitor.
Payment schedules call for her to pay about $35 a month through the year 2037.
Maykish plans to appeal to federal court, arguing that Rebecca cannot be expected to go to a regular school.
Her attorney, Stanczak, said the local courts have ignored Rebecca's disability. He said Palmerton has not accommodated her.
''This is an unusual disability and it's not something that schools are used to dealing with,'' he said.
Now that she is 17, Rebecca could legally drop out, but she says she wants to earn a diploma. She can attend Palmerton Area High School until she is 21, but she thinks a cyberschool or another boarding school would be better options.
Because her daughter has gone the past year without any formal education, Barbara Maykish said she thinks she might need another compensatory education fund.