O.C. Ordered to Attend to Its Troubled Children

SANTA ANA — A judge has ruled that Orange County is failing to abide by state laws governing mental-health evaluations for emotionally troubled students and ordered officials to get them done on time or be prepared to pay private doctors to do so.

Instead of providing educators with a mental-health assessment within 50 days, as the law requires, the administrative-law judge found that dozens of special-education students this year have had to wait longer--up to 200 days or more in extreme cases.

A group of local educators filed a complaint with the state earlier this year, saying the delays can be detrimental to children who need to be evaluated by doctors promptly so that specialized instruction programs can be prepared for them.

Judge Spencer A. Joe, who sits in Sacramento, reviewed the case and, in a ruling released Friday, ordered the state Department of Mental Health Services to help the county provide the assessments in a timely manner.

Joe also granted educators permission to hire private doctors at county expense to evaluate students if the county Health Care Agency doesn’t have anyone available.

School officials hailed the ruling as a major step toward providing special-education students with the mental-health evaluations, which are required by state law so that schools can prepare instructional plans for the students.

“We feel very positive about this. It’s going to satisfy the needs of the kids,” said Lucinda Hundley, director of special-education for the Santa Ana Unified School District. “We have been very concerned about the waiting lists and the delays. With this, we feel our concerns have been addressed.”

Ronald DiLuigi, assistant director of the Health Care Agency, said he and his staff were still reviewing the judge’s ruling but said the county is already taking steps to improve the situation.

The Board of Supervisors in September voted to increase by 32% funding for the mental-health assessment and other services for special-education students, and officials plan to institute several new programs that should “significantly reduce” the backlog.

“We were very pleased at the augmentations the supervisors made to our budget. We think it will go a long way toward dealing with this,” DiLuigi said. “We’ll need to take a look at [the ruling], but it sounds like the intention is to help.”

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The judge took note of the county’s planned improvements in his ruling. “These efforts, however commendable, do not guarantee the elimination of all delays,” Joe wrote. “Furthermore, [the county’s] ability to commence more timely assessments would not be effective until March or April of 1998.”

As for the county’s difficulty in anticipating the number of referrals from school districts, Joe concluded: “This does not excuse it from performing the assessments in a timely manner . . . under [the state] Education Code.”

Students are referred to the county when school officials suspect they may need individualized instruction. Educators emphasize that they only make referrals for a formal mental-health assessment if a student’s emotional problems are clearly interfering with his schoolwork or bothering fellow classmates.

The judge said the case “is more than just a dispute over the timing of such assessments and the fiscal affairs of a county agency. What’s at stake here is a child’s right to an assessment . . . and to a free and appropriate education.”

He pointed to lawsuits filed by public-interest groups and private attorneys that point to “procedural violations” such as missing the 50-day deadline as a basis for relief. “The inability of public agencies to coordinate their resources . . . does not mitigate or excuse them from performing that duty which is so clear by law.”

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The ruling cited several examples of students who faced waiting lists for mental-health assessments sometime this year. The Santa Ana Unified School District, for example, reported that 24 students were not assessed within the legal limits in May alone.

Of the 15 Tustin Unified School District students on a waiting list, five waited more than 104 days and one waited 284 days, according to the ruling.

Ronald Wenkart, general counsel for the Orange County Department of Education, praised the judge’s ruling. “The law is very clear on when these assessments have to be done,” he said. “I hope this will help build a cooperative relationship between the school districts and the county that will benefit the students.”

Educators have praised the work of county mental-health officials but said there simply aren’t enough professionals available to handle the number of students who need services. School officials also said the county needs to hire more doctors who speak Spanish and Vietnamese.