Children with disabilities in Gothenburg receive school transport

Seven-year-old Malte, who has Down syndrome, was removed from his old school and placed in a special school that he has a hard time getting to.

At the same time, the elementary school administration denied him a school bus.

– They have not taken into account the functional variation of Malta at all, said mother Catarina Dudas.

On Tuesday, a couple of days after GP’s release, however, the news came: the elementary school administration has reconsidered the decision. Now they will take him to school.

– This is exactly what we wanted. It feels great, of course.

But he is not without disgust. Because at the same time, she’s worried. The family previously appealed the decision and received no, and in the new message there was no justification as to why the decision was now changed.

– The school transport unit said that they reviewed Malta’s case again and concluded that they approved the request, says Catarina Dudas.

– Should something as simple as school transportation need the attention of the media to be treated correctly? she asks herself.

READ MORE: Malte was removed from school and denied school transportation

I don’t have half

Of the 942 requests for school transportation received prior to the 2020-2021 academic year, the administration approved 527, meaning nearly half were rejected, according to late-August figures.

– I imagine that many other families that may not have the same conditions as us are affected and the same thing happens to us. It is terrible that it should not be a more fair assessment in the cases, that it is so arbitrary, says Catarina Dudas.

The decision to offer school transportation in Malte, after all, was made on September 8, according to Marie Åhman, communications manager for the primary school administration. This changes a couple of days after the GP release.

She says several other decisions have been reviewed as well, including students at Hammarkullen who now get school transportation.

Internal criticism: “legally uncertain”

In an email received by GP, sent on September 8, the acting chief of authority of the elementary school administration, Nils Kaiser, writes to the person who signed during the decisions that Malte cannot drive to the school:

“Here, I think we should reconsider this and not for these students to refer to the responsibility of the VH (tutor, editor’s note).”

This is how the decision is changed, Malte gets a school bus and the parents are notified. But questions arise within the administration. An employee announcing that the decision has been changed now writes: “The signal becomes very clear when we reconsider the decision that can be directly linked to the attention in the media. VH (the mother) was very surprised. This is not good and it is certainly not legally safe. It would have been good if the process in the administrative court had been carried out. “

Nils Kaiser writes in another email that it is not due to reports from GP, but rather that they have discussed similar cases in the previous weeks.

“No, it wasn’t about GP but you and I have talked about similar cases in the past weeks. So I think it was Hammarkullen.”

Nils Kaiser notes that he does not comment on individual cases, but says that the administration during the fall, when the schools started, had a discussion about what guardian liability may entail. These are students with, for example, disabilities or students who have not been offered a place at the nearest school.

– Often these are pupils from the special primary school, who may stray a bit. Then we must do an individual assessment and see that sometimes we have reached different conclusions. We have had such a discussion in the department about how to look at it.

Do you usually send emails of this type in individual cases where a decision needs to be changed?

– When I think we need to reconsider a decision and make a global assessment, I present it. It may be that we have had similar discussions in similar cases before and therefore I think we need to review it again.

It says that the school law says what is the minimum they must meet.

– But there is nothing that says we can not approve more, says Nils Kaiser.

There was internal criticism that this is legally uncertain because the Malta decision was changed after GP wrote about it. What do you think of that criticism?

– We have regular discussions about how we do the evaluations, it is very important. That we have these discussions does not make it any less uncertain from a legal point of view, quite the opposite. But what we do in addition to the legislation does not have to be legally uncertain. It’s about the level of service, so I can understand that it is perceived that we pay attention to this after the articles, but the discussion took place before GP wrote it.

Would you have sent the email if GP didn’t report?

– I know there have been discussions before the GP article.

About half have received no. Do you look at all these cases?

– We do not look at all the decisions we have made. They are taken for very good reasons. These are a few students where it is always a more difficult individual assessment. But the vast majority are relatively clear decisions.

How do you see the risk that there are more cases that have not gone as they should?

– Decisions are made with reason. But in some cases an individual assessment becomes more difficult and when we do other general assessments, we may come to a different conclusion overall. There are some student problems that we constantly review.

How can you make it a fair assessment for everyone on this?

– We have ongoing discussions, and when we see that we need to make a different evaluation, we change.

Nils Kaiser has previously told GP that decisions can be appealed, so that someone else can make an assessment, and that administrators do the best they can and change their decisions when they receive a possible verdict against them.

– This is how it is. But of course we also have ongoing discussions in the department about how we should behave. We constantly review our work so that our guidelines follow the legislation and are appropriate.

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