‘I fear retaliation:’ Nolensville family says school district discriminated against their daughter

NOLENSVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) - A Nolensville family is calling their fight with Williamson County Schools a modern-day version of ‘David vs. Goliath.’ They say the district discriminated against their daughter and violated her federal right to a Free and Appropriate Public Education.

“She turned in work that we never got back and never got graded for,” says Brittany Goodman, the mother to Blakely, 13.

The Goodmans detail a year-long grading mishap that first came to light on April 18th, 2024. Brittany logged onto her daughter‘s online grading portal to find no grades listed in her 7th grade English Language Arts class for the 2023-2024 school year. According to the Goodmans, grades were still missing after the school year ended May 23, 2024. Days later, Brittany found what she believed to be arbitrary grades entered on Blakely’s behalf.

“I kept asking, ‘Why is she not getting grades?’ says Brittany. ”I don’t want grades fabricated! I want to see the work returned with the grade on it, just like all the other teachers have done every other year."

Brittany described her daughter going to school every day, overcoming the challenges of her disability and yet continuing to work hard to complete her school work.

“She deserves a grade, just like all of her typical peers,” says Brittany.

Blakely has Rett Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that primarily affects girls. It‘s a mutation of the X chromosome that occurs in roughly 1 in 10,000 girls around the world. The syndrome is characterized by missed milestones or regression by 18 months of age.

Rett syndrome leads to severe impairments, affecting nearly every aspect of life, namely a person’s ability to speak, walk, eat and breathe easily. For Blakely, she began losing her ability to speak and use her hands between 15- and 18 months of age.

“Her cognitive function is still intact, but this is a motor disability. She may not speak back to you, but she understands everything,” says Brittany. “A lot of these girls [with Rett Syndrome] are trapped in their own bodies.”

One way Blakely communicates is through a Tobii device that tracks her eye movement. It recognizes her gaze on words and pictures and then audibly says the words. The result is the creation of sentences, which Blakely can use for schoolwork and day-to-day communication.

“Because she’s in there, because she’s smart, because she’s bright, because she has likes and dislikes and emotions, just like any other 13-year-old girl, there is a lot she can do.”

Blakely’s abilities, despite her disability, are the reason the Goodman family has filed the discrimination claim with the Office of Civil Rights through the U.S. Department of Education.

In the claim, the family notes the lack of grades filed on Blakely’s behalf. They also note a secondary concern: lack of training for the teachers working with her.

For the last ten years, the Goodmans have paid between $4,000 and $5,000 annually for experts in Rett Syndrome to spend two days training the teachers working with Blakely. In addition, the family has paid for extra time with experts when teachers have expressed other needs or questions regarding how to help Blakely.

The family believes it’s a cost Williamson County Schools is federally required to pay.

“There are districts across the country that pay for this, [without a] problem,” says Brittany. “For us to move into Williamson County, into one of the most affluent counties, and the onus to fall back on us, the parents [is wrong].”

Before filing the federal complaint, the Goodmans say they pressed school leaders for answers regarding the lack of grades.

“Then all of a sudden, people started coming in from the district, and there were things written in [Blakely‘s] communication log, like ’data collection,‘“ says Brittany. ”I‘m like, ’ What‘s data collection? What are you collecting?’”

The result was a new Individualized Educational Plan (IEP) that the family says reduced Blakely from 7th-grade level math to preschool number counting.

“They were asking her questions like ‘Do you know what one through 33 is?’ Why are we asking her such intellectually insulting questions,” asked Brittany. “This is a kid who’s writing sentence-type essays about the Diary of Anne Frank, or telling her teacher about herself in sentence form.”

The lack of continuity within the IEP is something the Tennessee Disability Coalition says is all too common.

“We hear all the time from parents that they are getting generic IEPs that don’t match an evaluation IEPs with the wrong child’s name, obviously copied and pasted from a different IEP and insufficient evaluations,” says Jeff Strand, the Director of Public Policy at the Tennessee Disability Coalition (TDC).

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Strand points out there are 115,000 children in Tennessee public schools who have an IEP. It means 14% of Tennessee kids are in a special education program.

In the most recent Tennessee Educator Survey released annually by the TN Department of Education, 33% of teachers said they aren‘t getting enough training to work with kids who have disabilities. 43% said they didn’t get enough support from the schools to do their work well.

The TDC recently gave the state a ‘D’ grade in its annual scorecard for the lack of training and education for its special education teachers.

“It takes a lot to understand how to work with a child with Rett syndrome,” says Strand. “So the very simple, straightforward solution to this is to help people learn how to work with this child.”

In October, during a formal IEP meeting with the family, district employee William Turney is recorded as saying, “We denied the training basically across the board because we believe in-house Williamson County Schools can provide the training Rett University typically provided in the past.”

The denial of specialized training was the final straw that made the family decide to file a federal discrimination complaint. The family argues the district discriminated against Blakely on the grounds it violated her right to a Free and Appropriate Public Education.

The text of the law states public schools must provide ‘aids and related services free of charge.’ They must be offered ‘regardless of the severity of their disabilities.’

“I’m angry because the fight we have every day is hard enough,” says Brittany. “Why is there posturing? Why are we made to feel less than? Why is there gaslighting?”

When asked what she fears most about the process, Brittany responded, saying:

“I fear even speaking out, not only on behalf of Blakely but on families across the district. I fear retaliation by the bigger system. And if it’s happening to us with a 10-year track record of success, what is happening to these other families asking for a resource and they’re just being denied over and over and over again? These kids are being left behind unnecessarily.”

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