Nine-year-old David loves dinosaurs and scooters, trying new foods, and playing outdoors. At school he is especially good at reading, writing, and social studies but struggles with communication and abstract thinking. He is a very sociable kid, says his father, “the type of child other kids gravitate towards because he’s kind and easy to be around.” He learns best, his father told NJ Education Report, when included with neuro-typical peers, despite his diagnosis of autism.

However, during school hours David*, a fourth grader enrolled in Cherry Hill Public Schools, is segregated in a self-contained autism classroom. Over the last four years — David started kindergarten in Cherry Hill in 2021 — his parents have pleaded with their Child Study Team, superintendent, and special education administrators to place their child in an inclusion class  or at least integrate him with other non-classified students for part of the day. But, according to his father— who teaches world languages in another district in Camden County and is certified in special education—-Cherry Hill is adamant that David’s placement be in the district’s most restrictive environment. 

In response to a request for comment, Nina Baratti of Cherry Hill Public Schools said, while the district cannot comment on matters involving students due to privacy laws, it “strives to provide an inclusive and educational environment for each of our students. We are proud to serve approximately 2,200 students with IEP’s (Individualized Education Programs). The academic, social, and emotional needs of our students are at the center of all that we do.” The district “embraces inclusion as part of our culture, not just our policy” and offers “various inclusion opportunities and programs tailored to every learner.”

Yet David’s father’s depiction of his son’s experience is not the way the federal law called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is supposed to work. Instead, its fundamental principle is that classified students must  have access to a “free and appropriate public education” (FAPE) in the “least restrictive environment (LRE).” Yet David’s family joins other New Jersey families working fruitlessly to ensure their children are educated according to civil rights law.

“Under federal law, a student’s right to a free appropriate public education [FAPE] includes access to learning in the least restrictive environment, with support as needed,” explains Dawn Lorenzo,  a special education advocate of two students at Union Township Schools and founder of True North Advocacy. “When districts exclude students with disabilities from school or significantly restrict access without following required procedures, they risk denying FAPE — and that’s a serious systemic concern.”

But many NJ school districts resist this mandate, despite a federal lawsuit settled twelve years ago that requires them to overcome their reluctance to de-segregate students with disabilities and allow them their right to an inclusive education. An attorney for the plaintiffs predicted at the time of the settlement  that special needs students will now  “be educated alongside their peers who do not have disabilities, to the maximum extent appropriate.”

That hasn’t happened. In fact, according to the Star-Ledger,  the proportion of NJ students with disabilities placed in general education classrooms for the vast majority of the day has actually decreased by about 5 percentage points over the last decade. NJEA, the state teachers union says, “New Jersey remains the only state where less than half of its students with disabilities spend the majority of their day in general education.”

It’s not just Cherry Hill: 

• In Union Township Schools, a student who has a disability (represented by Lorenzo) was put on indefinite home instruction for getting in a fight in a playground. Special education law requires school districts to implement a Manifestation Determination Review when a student with a disability faces disciplinary action that results in a change of placement. His mother, who has filed for due process, says her son is being denied his right to be educated in the least restrictive environment with appropriate support.
• In Bernardsville a mom said her child who has autism that requires limited support was in an inclusion classroom for pre-K without any problems, but “Bernards administrators insisted he be placed in a self-contained classroom for kindergarten.”
• Terry Joyce of Cinnaminson, who has a five-year-old with Down Syndrome, explains her son was happily included with neurotypical peers as a four-year-old but the district insisted on placing her son in a self-contained class for students with significant disabilities the following year, despite her best efforts.  “They absolutely refused to even consider it,” Joyce said. “They told us, ‘We move so fast in kindergarten, he needs specialized instruction, he’ll get frustrated.’”

David’s father believes Cherry Hill is even more extreme and has “a culture that treats children with disabilities as liabilities rather than students with rights.” (See “Cherry Hill, Autism, and a Place for Cole.”) Certainly, New Jersey’s aversion to inclusion is well-documented.

According to a recent data analysis from the Hechinger Report, New Jersey has the worst record in the nation for integrating classified students into general education classrooms. The percentage of NJ classified students who spend most of their day (quantified as 80% or more) with typical peers is 45% — a rate that hasn’t changed in 20 years — compared to a national average of 68%. While there are infrastructural reasons for NJ’s failure to raise rates of inclusion— an abundance of school districts and private special education schools — federal law says students with disabilities must be placed with students without disabilities “to the maximum extent” possible, even if that requires schools to give them accommodations like instructional aides. But New Jersey, according to legal advocates and parents, flouts the law by placing students like David in the most restrictive settings. 

This pattern belies research that shows “there’s no harm to being included, but there’s great risks of harm to being segregated,” says Jennifer Kurth, a professor of special education at the University of Kansas. “Kids [with disabilities] who are included develop better academic skills, better communication skills, better social skills, just kind of everything we try to measure.” Indeed, David has been successfully integrated with his non-disabled peers in his Hebrew school and in other settings that have far fewer resources. (According to the NJ Department of Education’s Taxpayers’ Guide, Cherry Hill spent $30,565 per student during school year 2024-2025.)

Why is Cherry Hill — and, indeed, other NJ school districts– so averse towards placements that are good for all kids? 

David’s father thinks it’s because districts like Cherry Hill reactively steer parents towards litigation, turning what should be a collaborative effort into an adversarial one. He says as soon as a disagreement pops up in IEP meetings, staff exhort parents “to go right to due process.” To buttress this claim, he has collated data from the NJ Education Department’s Dispute Resolution Unit which shows, he says,  “Cherry Hill is consistently generating 20–34 due process complaints per year, plus very high mediation counts,” a count that  puts them “wildly out of sync” with other NJ school districts. He calls this pattern  “repeat-player/high-frequency” category. His OPRA requests from the district, while largely unfulfilled or ignored, “show continuous billing by multiple law firms and repeated resolutions behind closed doors instead of systemic fixes.”

Indeed, David’s parents have spent the last four years engaged in battles with district leaders, availing themselves of emergent relief, due process, and mediation as early as their son’s kindergarten year, all so David can spend time with his peers during the school day.  Despite their best efforts, he remains in a classroom that, his father claims, offers instruction that is “rote, undifferentiated, and not matched to how he learns” while he remains in the most restrictive environment. When once David — due to a paperwork mistake  — experienced inclusion, he did just fine and thoroughly enjoyed the new experience. The district immediately tried to rescind the arrangement.

They’ve met with Cherry Hill Superintendent Dr. Kwame R. Morton and special education leaders Caitlin Mallory and Trina Ragsdale. They’ve spoken out at school board meetings. They’ve begged for a special education audit of the district’s placement history. They have a doctor’s letter explaining that David, a gentle and eager-to-please child with no behavior problems, would benefit from learning beside neurotypical peers.

And now they’re back to filing complaints with the state and county. 

Most recently, they filed for due process because David’s new IEP goals for school year 2025-2026 are almost identical to last year’s, even though, says his father, he’s met almost all of them. In documents shared with NJ Ed Report, the parents explain they want to discuss taking him out of the autism classroom and into a multiply-disabled one so his learning environment will be more inclusive. They want the district to adhere to federal rulings that Child Study Teams, every year, must consider the full continuum of placements for a special education student, including less restrictive options, and provide an explanation for placement decisions.

They want their son to be part of his community. In Cherry Hill, they say, that’s a step too far. 

*”David” is not this child’s given name. At his father’s request, NJER is using a pseudonym out of his fear of retaliation.