Parents and advocates urge Highlands County School Board to seek residential placement after repeated violent incidents

At a Highlands County School Board meeting, parents and advocates urged the district to pursue residential placement and medical interventions for an 11-year-old student who has repeatedly attacked staff and family, speakers said.

Those who addressed the board described a pattern of escalating aggression that they said district staff have not adequately managed, culminating in the child’s Baker Act hospitalization in Kissimmee and forced medication there. Parents and advocates repeatedly said a district-paid neuropsychological evaluation completed April 15, 2023, recommends medical assessment and, if medicines do not control the behavior, consideration of a residential placement.

Joey Poyer, an exceptional-student-education (ESE) advocate, described episodes of hitting, spitting and yelling in school and criticized what he characterized as misuse of the student’s behavior intervention plan (BIP). “BIPs are not consequence. They are a plan to help a student to teach them appropriate behaviors,” Poyer said, adding staff safety concerns and saying the student had been Baker Acted and placed out of county.

Victoria Liao, the child’s mother, told the board she has been communicating with the receiving hospital and said staff there have used an injection to administer medication after the child refused oral medicine. “You guys don’t care about my son at all,” Liao said, describing repeated requests for evaluations and services she said went unimplemented. She told the board the evaluation the district paid for documented recommendations that she said have not been followed.

Linda Montalbano, an advocate who has represented parents in special-education cases, cited the April 15, 2023, neuropsychological evaluation and a QEEG brain-mapping study she said the district paid for. Montalbano said the evaluation recommended a pediatric neurologist consider a mood stabilizer and that, if medication did not sufficiently control outbursts, a residential facility should be considered to protect the student’s mother and school staff.

Board attorney Mrs. Nash told speakers that the policy currently before the board (Policy 2460, Exceptional Student Education) concerned proposed changes tied to testing programs and that questions about procedural safeguards and due-process procedures should be taken up separately with legal staff.

No board motion or vote to change the student’s placement was taken during the meeting. Public commenters asked the board to act on the evaluation’s recommendations, and advocates pressed for clearer procedural safeguards and better implementation of individualized-education-program (IEP) recommendations.

The comments prompted several speakers at the meeting to highlight two issues: whether the district had fully implemented recommendations from the paid neuropsychological evaluation and whether parents had access to the full set of dispute-resolution tools they may be entitled to under state administrative procedures. The board did not take a public vote on the student’s placement during the meeting.

The district’s superintendent announced a schedule of upcoming workshops and events but did not announce any immediate operational action in response to the public comments. Members of the public and board asked that procedural-safeguard language and state-complaint information be made clearer in future policy drafts and workshops.

Ending: Advocates asked the board to follow up with a written response and implementation timeline; board staff and the attorney told commenters procedural and legal questions should be handled in follow-up meetings or with the district’s legal staff, and no formal change to the student’s placement was recorded at the meeting.