Under federal law, children with disabilities are entitled to receive special education services, and when these are inadequate, they can file complaints, which need to be addressed in a timely manner: within 75 days.

But for years, in New York City, that process has dragged on for much longer, depriving disabled children of forms of assistance they need to succeed in school — things like special curricula, school accommodations, speech, occupational or physical therapy, supplemental math or reading instruction — and burdening their families with expenses and bureaucracy.

Earlier this week, the New York State Education Department and the New York City Department of Education settled a class action brought in March 2020 by children with disabilities living in the city who said they had to wait an average of 8½ months to have their claims resolved.

The class action was powered by New York Legal Assistance Group, a nonprofit civil legal services organization representing poor New Yorkers, in a yearslong collaboration with Sullivan & Cromwell LLP attorneys working pro bono.

As part of the settlement agreement, which was finalized by a federal judge in Brooklyn on Tuesday, the state and city's education departments will make changes to ensure that families receive timely decisions on their complaints, which are issued by administrative hearing officers.

Under the settlement, NYCDOE and NYSED are bound to improve their hearing systems, including the technology that powers it, changing the way they handle resolution and settlements of complaints, provide oversight and training to hearing officers, and increase transparency.

The city will also be required to provide "special protections" for certain students whose hearing decisions are overdue, including immediate evaluations for some special services and makeup services for children whose complaints were decided late.

"The longer students go without the supports they need, the more challenging it becomes to make up for lost ground. NYCDOE and NYSED disregarded our clients' rights to timely hearings to secure special education services for too long," Jessica Selecky, director of New York Legal Assistance Group's Special Education Unit, said in a statement. "This lawsuit, and this settlement, are finally changing that."

The class action was brought by 11 minors — identified only by their initials — who are students in New York City and contend with a wide range of disabilities, including learning and reading disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, autism, as well as anxiety and depression, among other things.

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a law Congress reauthorized in 1990, parents are afforded "impartial due process" hearings where they can challenge the adequacy and appropriateness of the special education services offered to their children.

The law, also known as IDEA, sets up a 75-day time frame starting on the day a parent files a complaint. Within that time period, an impartial hearing officer must be assigned, a hearing held, and a decision issued.

The time frame includes a 30-day resolution period during which the school system must have a settlement meeting with the parent within 15 days of receiving the complaint — followed by a 45-day decision window. The resolution deadline can be extended if the parties request it.

When NYLAG and Sullivan & Cromwell filed the initial complaint in February 2020, that timeline in New York City had soared to be three or four times as long. Right before the lawsuit was filed, the average case length was 259 days in the city and 135 days in the rest of the state.

Official state data referenced in the complaint showed the case resolution time frame had continued to swell, year after year, beginning with the school year ending in 2015, when it was 149 days in the city and 115 days in the rest of New York. And as of January 2020, there were nearly 10,200 open due process complaints, of which more than 6803 — about 67% — had already passed their deadline. At that time, NYCDOE had only 67 part-time hearing officers to handle the caseload, according to the complaint.

While waiting in limbo to receive assistance from the public school system for which they are entitled by law, families often have to turn to private institutions to teach their children — but that can be costly and unaffordable to many.

Through the litigation, plaintiff attorneys argued the delays especially harmed indigent families because they cannot pay up front for private special education services and wait years to be paid back.

"For years, the agencies tasked with supporting students made families wait months or more to find out if their children would get special education supports, causing immense harm to these students' educational and social well-being," Danielle Tarantolo, director of NYLAG's Special Litigation Unit and lead NYLAG attorney for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement. "It's unjust for even one family to experience this, but the systemic inequities at play were especially detrimental for lower income New Yorkers across the board."

According to the complaint, J.S.M., a 15-year-old from Queens struggling with dyslexia, anxiety, depression, and who read several years below his grade level, had been denied special education services since second grade. By the time the lawsuit was filed, his parents had been waiting for more than four months with no hearing scheduled.

Other children plaintiffs were still waiting for hearings to be scheduled after hearing officers assigned to their cases recused, or were not assigned at all.

NYCDOE and NYSED did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

In a call with Law360, Tarantolo said finding a legal solution to the due process hearing delays was a priority for NYLAG, which legally assists many of the city's indigent children and their families to access education and other services.

"These students really needed our help and were not being treated fairly," said Tarantolo, who personally dedicated thousands of hours to the class action. "We made the institutional commitment that we would see this litigation through, even though we knew it would drain a lot of our resources and be very time-consuming."

The attorneys say the pressure of the litigation itself and the public scrutiny that followed have produced meaningful progress, even years before the federal court could approve a settlement.

Since the complaint was filed, the city and the state took proactive steps to streamline the resolution process for due process claims.

By January 2022, the percentage of due process complaints that were timely processed had gone up from about 33% to 42.4%, court records show. And, as U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee for the Eastern District of New York noted in his final approval on the settlement, the percentage of timely resolutions reached about 84% in the school year concluding in 2024.

William B. Monahan, one of the Sullivan & Cromwell attorneys who worked on the litigation, said the firm was representing parents of children with disabilities before realizing that their issues with due process hearings were part of a bigger problem. That's when the firm decided to team up with NYLAG on the class action.

"It was just great teamwork and partnership on this," Monahan said.

--Editing by Jay Jackson Jr.