A Lecanto teacher says she and her husband dropped their FCAT lawsuit but will work to reform state law.
By BARBARA BEHRENDT
Published February 17, 2004
LECANTO - Judy Castillo may have given up her lawsuit, but she is far from giving up the fight.
Instead of challenging the law that doesn't allow her to see her autistic son's FCAT scores, she and others are pushing to change that law.
"You know they say that when one door closes, another one opens," she said. "Well, this is a better one because it will help other folks and not just me."
In October, Castillo and her husband, Joseph, who live in Brooksville, filed a legal action seeking the release of her son's results on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Since her son Jordan is autistic and children with autism have trouble with language, Castillo argued that in order to help her son improve his score, she needed to know what he was asked and how he answered.
Jordan was held back in his third-grade class at Lecanto Primary School because he didn't pass the test.
A month after the lawsuit was filed, Department of Education officials told the Castillos that the department would not release the test and that, if the Castillos didn't drop their lawsuit by this week, they could be ordered to pay the state's legal fees.
Castillo, a Lecanto High School teacher, said she and her husband dropped the lawsuit before the deadline. Another Florida man had filed a similar lawsuit without success, and she said it made no sense to try the same waters again.
Instead, she and others who have disputes with the state-mandated test are trying a different approach.
Through the Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform, Castillo and others have taken their concerns about FCAT to interested lawmakers. A bill filed both in the state Senate and the House of Representatives would allow a student's parent or guardian the right to review questions and the student's answers on the FCAT and any other state-required academic tests.
In addition to supporting those bills, Castillo has also made several speaking engagements, including one this past weekend in Orlando, where she shared her frustration with trying to get the state to release her son's testing results to her.
Everywhere she goes, she said, she finds that parents are surprised at how powerless they are to do anything if their child runs into problems with the FCAT.
Castillo, who teaches English, has no problem with the test itself. Her problem stems from its use as a high-stakes test. Although she agrees the tool would provide good information about what areas a student needs to work on, she does not agree that it should be the sole decider of who moves from third to fourth grade and who earns a high school diploma.
Once she saw the effect the state's use of the test was having on students, including her own son, she decided she needed to do something. "It's a flawed law. There's no doubt about it," she said.
State officials have argued that allowing parents to see the test could compromise it. But as a teacher, she said, she constantly hears her students talking about the questions.
"The kids talk about the test all of the time," she said. "After a while, the validity is gone anyway. They'd have to change the questions now and then anyway."
Castillo said she plans to continue to tell anyone who will listen about the tough time she had with the Department of Education, which even encouraged her to talk to an expert in the department's ranks about special accommodations for students with disabilities.
She followed through with all their instructions only to find out that their expert didn't know anything about special needs children.
And when she followed the state's instructions to set up a conference call to talk about the topic, she got a terse letter back from the state saying that the call wasn't acceptable.
When the whole process was done, Castillo said the obvious choice was simply to change the rules.
"It's so crazy to work within their parameters. I just want to change the parameters," she said.
