Testimony: Public Oversight Hearing on OSSE-DOT
Senior Policy Attorney Danielle Robinette testified at the Committee of the Whole’s public oversight hearing on the Office of the State Superintendent of Education’s Division of Student Transportation (OSSE-DOT). Her testimony addressed OSSE-DOT’s inadequate transportation for DC students with disabilities, citing issues we’ve heard from our clients for more than a decade.
Danielle presented new data from our class-action lawsuit (compiled by Bates White Economic Consulting, LLC) that indicate that OSSE’s “on-time” performance metric does not accurately reflect whether the bus arrives at a student’s home in the scheduled window or whether the student arrives at school prior to the start of instruction. Moreover, the findings demonstrate how OSSE-DOT’s provision of transportation fails to ensure that DC students with disabilities have access to a free, appropriate public education.
The District is Failing to Provide Transportation for Students with Disabilities
Parents and guardians of children with disabilities living in the District of Columbia, along with The Arc of the United States, filed a class action lawsuit on March 7, 2024 against DC’s Office of the State Superintendent for Education for failing to provide safe, reliable and effective transportation to and from schools for children with disabilities, thereby denying students equal access to their education and unnecessarily segregating them from their peers.