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HOUSTON — Hannah Wier won a lawsuit against Spring Branch ISD filed in 2015, alleging the district hadn’t provided the proper special education services for her son, who has autism.

A decade and $580,000 in attorney’s fees later, the case is still ongoing.

“Where being right and winning becomes more important than doing the right thing for the student, then we lose focus,” said Roy Atwood, the attorney for the Wiers. “Then we wind up in litigation for 10 years instead of just getting the student what they need.”

Every step to the Fifth Circuit and back to due-process hearings, attorneys hired by Spring Branch ISD have appealed rulings for the family, arguing that the school district doesn’t owe the family damages, and asking to have the almost $35,000 they paid for the boy’s private school tutoring refunded.

The school district’s attorneys also asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, although it denied the request and sent the case back down through the court system until a second due-process hearing was required. The result of that hearing, to reimburse the Wiers $3,450 for a summer of tutoring, was contested by both parties. In March, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Wiers. They are now awaiting final judgment on the amount of the compensatory award.

Representatives for Spring Branch ISD declined to comment on this story because the case is ongoing. However, attorneys in case filings have challenged that the initial hearing officer’s decision was “erroneous as a matter of law” and have filed appeals to subsequent rulings that not enough evidence was presented to justify the decision that the district owes the Wiers private school placement tuition.

“This case may still bankrupt my family. There is no level playing field, and even when we win, we lose,” Wier said during public testimony this spring for a bill that would increase transparency around how much school districts spend on legal fees.

Texas Education Agency sees increase in due-process hearings

Since 2010, the earliest that the Texas Education Agency began posting due-process hearing decisions online, there has been an average of 30 due-process decisions released every year, although in 2024, there was a record 45 decisions. That’s not including any mediations or settlements, which aren’t reported publicly.

Most parents of the 856,000 children with disabilities in Texas never get to the point of filing for due process. It’s either too daunting, too expensive, or they may not even know it’s an option, experts said. And the ones that make it to the mediation table mostly settle with districts as soon as possible. Those who sue mostly lose, and those who win can expect to face an appeal from the district.

About 142,500 of Texas’ special education students have autism, the second highest primary disability category after specific learning disability, according to state data.

Few families hang on as long as the Wiers have. Even fewer win compensatory education, where a public school pays for private placement tuition. Because of this, O.W. v. Spring Branch ISD has been cited over 100 times and is known by many civil rights and disability lawyers across Texas. Its importance is part of the reason the Wiers have hung on, they said. After a certain point, it was no longer just about their son, who is now 20.

“They have lost the key issue of whether they provided a free, appropriate public education. At that point, settle up and move on. The student’s not even in (the) district anymore,” Atwood said. “Stretching this out and just dragging it on and on hurts kids.”

One reason districts often fight these cases is because schools have been historically underfunded, especially in the realm of special education. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act passed in 1975, the federal government was supposed to fund up to 40% of the services schools supply. Instead, multiple estimates show the funding never eclipsed half that. The IDEA Full Funding Act, an attempt to remedy this issue, has been filed in Congress multiple times, and was filed again this April.

Special education has been underfunded at the state level, too. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath told the House Committee on Public Education during the most recent legislative session that the state was facing a $1.7 billion special education funding deficit. While there was legislation passed to change the special education funding system in Texas, it remains to be seen whether it will result in real change for districts.

Despite these funding shortfalls, the U.S. Supreme Court just opened more avenues for families to sue their school districts for damages from improper special education services, in a unanimous decision on June 12.

“The one thing that the school district lawyers and I absolutely, fundamentally agree on, is our public schools in Texas are not appropriately funded,” Atwood said. “They don’t have the resources they need to do the job that they’re tasked with doing, especially when it comes to educating our kids with disabilities. So then, why are you spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on litigation, fighting over one Child Find determination?”

‘It was starting to get worse and worse’

The 2014-15 school year was one of the hardest years of the Wiers’ family life. It was certainly one of the hardest years for their son, who did not want to be interviewed for this story, partly because he doesn’t remember much of that year, Hannah Wier said.

But Wier, her husband Dan, their daughter Caroline and Wier’s father, Mike Inselmann, remembered most everything in a tearful discussion on a warm June evening at the Wiers’ Bellaire home.

Wier knew her son had behavior problems. It was evident in kindergarten in Spring Branch ISD that he needed more support, and, while considered gifted, he was aggressive toward other children, so the Wiers pulled him out and put him in private school for two years. When he continued to have problems at the private school, they transferred him to another private school where he did better. He was also seeing a psychiatrist, and when she reported he was progressing at the second school, the Wiers decided to give the district, where their older daughter attended, another go. But things quickly went downhill.

“It was starting to get worse and worse. He was gaining a lot of weight. He was chewing his clothes. He was picking his ears and skin until it bled,” Wier said.

The district did not evaluate him for special education at the beginning of fifth grade, instead placing him on a 504 plan. This was before the special education cap was removed in Texas, in the wake of a Houston Chronicle investigation on the subject. The cap caused a slew of issues with Child Find, the statute that requires school districts to locate and evaluate all children with disabilities, even those who attend private school or are homeschooled. Currently, 15.5% of the total student population in Texas receives special education services, but before the cap was removed, special education students made up 8.7% of the total.

As the year progressed, Wier’s son continued to act out, including cursing, disrupting class, leaving the classroom and sleeping in school, which Wier said is a coping mechanism for her son when overstimulated. In January 2015, he hit one of his teachers in the neck, who decided to press charges, and Wier’s son, then 10, was arrested and taken to the Spring Branch ISD police station, where his parents had to bail him out. The case was eventually dismissed.

“It was weird dealing with the school because we knew what a sweet boy he was,” Dan Wier said. “I think the teachers probably thought of him as kind of a monster.”

Once the Wiers’ son was evaluated for special education, the family and the school agreed on an individualized educational program for the child and placed him on a different campus. But the situation didn’t improve. Wier remembered getting calls almost daily about his behavior, and for a while, would have panic attacks when getting a call from the school’s number. He was even starting to get suicidal, she said.

“I would know that something happened, and I could feel the tension and the hurt,” said Caroline Wier, the boy’s older sister, who was 12 at the time. “They kind of tried to keep me out of it, (but) the overall climate is something that you still feel in that fear, that anxiety … He just slept all the time. You could tell he was depressed.”

By the end of the year, the boy was failing classes, and his parents decided to place him in tutoring at a private school for the summer, where he ended up staying for two years until another behavior incident got him removed from the school.

Eventually, the family decided to send their son to a therapeutic wilderness program before he transitioned to a boarding school in Virginia. Hannah Wier said she believes the program saved his life, but it took a toll on the family.

“I do really remember very clearly the day you told me that he was going to go away to boarding school, when we went to a bagel shop,” Caroline said to her mom. “I remember the conversation of, ‘We’ve done everything we can do, but we cannot keep him here. We think now that the best option that’s going to keep him safe and help him and would be the best for his future is, sadly … he’s not going to be living with us anymore.”

After that, she remembered walking by his empty room daily and missing his loud guitar playing that she previously found annoying. She worried she would never have a relationship with her brother. And the more she learned about the case her parents were fighting, the less she wanted to attend school in Spring Branch.

“I remember that year like a bubble popping,” she said. “It kind of broke a lot of that foundational trust I have for these sorts of institutions. And I don’t think that’s something I’m ever going to fully get back.”

She has since interned at disability rights organizations and spread the word to friends in college about how to navigate legal systems, encouraging them to keep track of evidence and to be careful what they put in writing because text messages or emails can be subpoenaed.

“Part of the thing I’ve learned is you can have all this stuff happen to you, but if there’s no evidence of it, if there’s no notes, then people will just like — nobody cares,” she said.

Efforts to increase transparency

Over the past nine years and counting, the Wiers have spent $580,000 on legal fees, for which they plan to ask the district to reimburse. But they have little idea how much the district has spent, and when they asked via a public records request in 2023, the public records coordinator responded that it would cost over $1,008 to compile the eight years of fee bills.

This is part of the reason that Hannah Wier decided to testify in Austin this legislative session alongside other parents of children with disabilities for Senate Bill 111, authored by state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood. Though the bill was mostly a Republican legislator-led effort, some Democratic senators voted for a watered-down version of the initial bill that passed the Senate in May. However, it did not make it far enough in the House before the end of the session.

The version that passed the Senate would have required that school districts report how much they spend on legal fees relating to special education cases each month, if that number exceeded $10,000.

“Chasing a parent with taxpayer money through the court system, time after time after time on the same issue, getting the same ruling from the judges and continuing the process? That’s the kind of thing that we need to correct,” Hall said over Zoom.

The original bill capped district spending on special education due-process litigation at $10,000, which opponents considered a low bar since due-process suits often cost much more than that to litigate. It also included a mandatory reporting requirement where the board would have to be made aware of instances when special education legal fees would exceed the $10,000 limit. The board would then be required to do a cost-benefit analysis either directing the district to settle, or hold a vote on whether to exceed the spending limit and continue litigation.

Hall said his intent wasn’t to unnecessarily punish school districts by opening the door for more parents to file frivolous suits, but he said there was a need for transparency, especially because most districts were paying high-dollar attorneys from outside firms to handle the cases.

“If they’re going to be expending public funds in multiple appearances in court on the same issue and losing, they’re going to have to post the information so the public can be aware of it,” he said.

Some testifiers understood why the initial bill may have incurred some opposition, but opposition to the final version, which just required transparency, seemed less logical.

“What this Senate Bill 111 ended up being stripped down to was strictly a transparency bill. How could anyone be in opposition to facts in a public institution being made more readily available?” said Fort Worth-area parent Courtney Morey, who has a 4-year-old daughter with Down syndrome.

Morey testified in support of SB 111, after going through due process against Aledo ISD when the special education department wanted to administer an IQ test for her daughter, who had such a severe speech impediment that Morey worried she would not get an accurate result. But that wasn’t an option. If Morey wanted to get speech therapy services from the school district, her daughter had to be IQ-tested, Morey said.

She ultimately lost her due-process case; however, what she learned opened her eyes to a side of disability education that not many parents see. She said it felt like the odds were stacked against her. No longer was it about educating her child properly, but about the fact that she challenged the district, she said.

“What we learned about due process is something that the general public has no idea about. And this is why things never change for special education,” Morey said. “The time that it took, the emotional capacity it took to go through that, but especially the expense — families just can’t do that. They can’t even get to step one, 90% of the time.”

While the bill didn’t ultimately make it to the final stages, Hall said he will file it again as soon as he can.

“Why wouldn’t everybody want reform and transparency?” Wier said. “Because, to me, if you’re not one of the bad guys doing the bad things, … I would want everybody to see, ‘That’s not who we are. We’re the good guys.’”

Moving on

The Weirs lives have changed significantly from when their fight against Spring Branch ISD began a decade ago.

They no longer live in the Memorial neighborhood where they started their family, after downsizing to a house closer to the grandparents a few years ago. Memorial wasn’t home for them anymore, anyway, they said. Both of the Wier children are now in college. Hannah Wier’s son is more than a foot taller, the tallest in the family. Caroline and her brother are closer than ever and sport matching tattoos. The family also adopted a terrier mix, who is a therapy dog. Since retiring, Wier and her husband began a consulting business to help people find the right care for their elderly family members.

Their favorite times spent together are nights around the dinner table. The past decade has bonded the family together instead of tearing them apart, Wier said.

But every once and a while, Hannah Wier gets a call or email related to the case. It’s like a planter’s wart on her foot, she said. She can almost forget it’s there, but not really.

“I didn’t ever feel like I had a choice (to stop fighting), other than saving money, because we already did it. The precedent was set,” Wier said. “Does it unravel that precedent if we stop? Then what was it all for?”

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