Science prevails in another victory for a Pennsylvania school district

Just under two weeks ago, science won a small victory. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania denied the appeal of two parents suing the Lower Merion, PA school district for allegedly violating the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). At issue was whether the school had neglected to provide their son with a free and appropriate public education (known under the IDEA as FAPE). The parents alleged that the school failed to provide FAPE because it refused

1.    to allow their son to use, in academic settings, a form of facilitated communication known as Spelling to Communicate (S2C)

2.    to provide their son with a trained communication partner for communication via S2C

The James Byrne Courthouse, which houses the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Based on testimony from the original (2019) hearing, the 43-page court document that contains the court decision (publicly available through this portal) describes Spelling to Communicate as follows:

S2C is a method by which a communication partner holds a letterboard in the eyeline of a nonverbal speaker and the speaker points to letters on the board…The communication partner writes out the letters the speaker points to, letter by letter, and re-directs the speaker if he is pointing to letters in a nonsensical order. [Boldface added here and elsewhere.]

Consistent with this, one of the communication partners of the plaintiffs’ child testified that “he ‘won’t accept’ if A.L. points to the wrong letters.”  

Furthermore:

A.L.’s mother testified that A.L.’s communication partners helped him “[i]f he appears to get stuck or if he appears to get random”; that is, “they’ll say [A.L.], reset, I’m going to go back and I’m going to read the last thing that made sense because you lost me there.”…  Similarly, if the communication partner does not understand what the speaker is spelling, they may pull the board away and have the speaker start over…  (“If he gets inaccurate or if he gives me a string of letters, I’ll pull the board back . . . .”).

As far as the plaintiffs are concerned, this is testimony in favor of S2C.

Also testifying for the plaintiffs was the paintiff’s private speech-language pathologist:

Susan Chaplick, A.L.’s private speech-language pathologist, observed A.L. using S2C and concluded that “[t]here is a significant discrepancy in his ability to express himself verbally versus using the letter boarding technique.” She also acknowledged that the method is not evidence based but said that it nevertheless “looks very promising” for A.L.

Then there was the private neuropsychologist:

Dr. Robbins concedes that her evaluations were not conducted in accordance with standardized administration protocol because (1) A.L. communicated on a letterboard with the assistance of a communication partner (his mother); and (2) his parents were present for the evaluations… Additionally, A.L.’s father served as the communication partner for the initial evaluation, but Dr. Robbins ended that evaluation prematurely because A.L. “was reluctant to participate (did not provide reliable responses to questions).”

(When the student was later evaluated, without communicative assistance from his father, by the school district’s psychologist, his performance was much worse, yielding cognitive skills in the third percentile).

Yet the student had, all this time, been communicating quite effectively, reliably, and independently with his index fingers (both of them), via both a Bluetooth device and a laptop

which his teachers had observed worked well for him…  (the District’s speech-language pathologist testifying that A.L. “actually does really well with keyboarding, he can keyboard his ideas, things he wants using the laptop”)… (A.L.’s special education teacher testifying that “he could type extremely well” and that “[m]ost of his activities were typed in some regard or another, because [the district] knew that was his strength”).

As part of the school’s exploration of the student’s facilitation through S2C, a special ed supervisor and a speech-language pathologist observed him at Inside Voice, an S2C clinic in nearby Springfield, PA. According to the latter’s testimony:

[A.L.’s communication partner] was reading to him a passage about presidents, and then having him answer questions. She would write his answers on her clipboard, she would use intonation patterns while she was reading, she would spell random words from her passage while she was reading the passage aloud to him. And she went from very close-ended questions to open-ended questions at the end . . . . I also observed [the communication partner] using prompts, she would do things like, closer, go get it, left, up, down, while he was poking the letters.

At a second visit to Inside Voice, the student’s reading teacher, Ms. Van Horn, brought a list of questions based on a midterm exam from the student’s U.S. history class.

A.L. and his communication partner began working through the short-answer and multiple-choice questions on the letterboard, but “he wasn’t getting the correct answers” and seemed “flubbled”—i.e., he seemed anxious responding to the questions. .. A.L.’s communication partner asked for an answer key, and “[t]hen the answers were coming out correctly.”…  Ms. Van Horn was troubled by what she observed, particularly by the fact that A.L.’s behavior and the communication partner’s demeanor changed once the communication partner knew the correct answers.

What she was observing, of course, was an impromptu message passing test—the sort of test that, under well-controlled testing protocols, has consistently shown that the facilitators/communication partners are the ones authoring the facilitated messages.

So what happens when you remove the facilitator and leave behind the letterboard? This case offers some anecdotal evidence. Back at school, in a one-on-one reading class with Mr. Bosch, his longtime special ed teacher, the student was allowed to type on the letterboard without a communication partner present and holding it up for him.

But the letterboarding did not prove effective without a communication partner... Mr. Borsch explained that A.L. “did spell some things but did not communicate anything that was comprehensive to what we were discussing.”

Finally, there’s what happened when the school district requested training from the developer of S2C, Elizabeth Vosseller:

The developer of S2C was unavailable, so another representative came in her stead and led a three-day training in September 2018…  The training was disorganized, and the trainer failed to provide a manual because there were “no specific guidelines for using the boards in academic and functional settings.”… The trainer was also unable to answer questions about the use of the method in the academic setting and admitted that “there [was] no current scientific research or data to support the use of letter boarding with a facilitated communication partner.”

At this training, furthermore, the student himself, according to the school’s speech-language pathologist, was “really inconsistent”; “at times he wasn’t accurate . . . he might have tapped two or three times and then finally got to an H.” And Mr. Borsch, who also attended, “ felt that he ‘was being trained to prompt [A.L.] to answer on the board.’”

All this testimony, and much, much more, was part of the original case. As the “procedural history” in the 2019 document containing the hearing officer’s decision recounts:

 it is difficult to believe that the education of a young person could generate documents and witness testimony rivaling the IBM v. Xerox litigation. The parties presented the testimony of 16 witnesses over three full days of the hearing. In addition, tens of thousands of pages of documents were offered into evidence.

Subsequently, as part of their appeal, as the 2022 court document recounts:

Plaintiffs moved to supplement the administrative record to include A.L.’s testimony, videos of A.L. using S2C, and a peer-reviewed study on the efficacy of S2C as a means for communication for persons with autism. The Court permitted Plaintiffs to supplement the administrative record with A.L.’s testimony (to be offered using S2C) and four videos of A.L. using S2C in academic settings, but the Court denied Plaintiffs’ request to supplement the administrative record with the peer-reviewed study.

The peer-reviewed study was almost certainly the Jaswal eye-tracking study, reviewed here by yours truly.

At this point, you can probably guess what the most damning evidence was in the outcome of this appeal. The school district, along with its expert witnesses, have been repeatedly demonized by the plaintiffs, their advocates, and their followers. So has the American Speech Language Hearing Association, for its position statement against the Rapid Prompting Method, of which Spelling to Communicate is a close cousin. But as far as the judge was concerned: “the most compelling pieces of evidence are the District’s personnel’s first-hand observations of A.L. using S2C.”

The parents are almost certainly appealing.