This story has been updated.

Jacqueline Oliver says her daughter, a student at Bridgeport Public Schools who has autism, was allowed on two separate days last winter to beat her head against a hard surface more than 150 times without someone stepping in to intervene.

“God forbid if I got home and my daughter would’ve done something out of the norm like taking a nap. And what if she would’ve never woken up?” Oliver told the state Board of Education during a meeting in January. 

Oliver’s story was one of several included in a complaint to the state made by the nonprofit Center for Children’s Advocacy alleging Bridgeport schools have violated the rights of special education students by failing to provide them with an adequate education. 

It’s the fourth complaint the organization has filed against the school district since 2013, according to attorney Kathryn Meyer, the director of the Yale Child Study Center Medical-Legal Partnership Project. 

Meyer said CCA filed a complaint in 2021 also in reference to the high turnover in the district. But although the state did a “thorough investigation” and issued “pretty substantive corrective action,” she said, most of the administrators and staff members who were present in 2021 are now no longer with the district. 

The complaint claims that the school district, as of late June, had 24 vacancies for special education teachers and 46 vacancies for paraeducators, with “no concrete plan to promptly fill these vacancies.” 

In the case of Oliver’s daughter, her classroom was being led by substitute teachers who did not have special education certification, and the paraeducators working in the classroom were not trained to work with autistic students, according to the complaint.

CCA’s complaint, which cites Oliver’s experience, said this caused the girl to experience a great deal of anxiety and stress — by late March, she was refusing to enter the school building. When she agreed to return in May, she was met with another substitute teacher. 

“[The student] effectively made no academic progress during the 2023-2024 school year and missed countless hours of specialized instruction and related service hours,” the CCA complaint read. 

According to the complaint, at least a dozen special education classrooms across the Bridgeport district do not have a certified special education teacher to lead them, and long-term substitute teachers lead classrooms with some of the students who have the greatest needs. Paraeducators, who are meant to work one-on-one with special education students, have been assigned to other areas of the district. 

Bridgeport Public Schools did not provide a comment to the Connecticut Mirror in time for publication.

State Department of Education Chief of Staff Laura Stefon confirmed the state had received the complaint and assigned it to an investigator. She said representatives for the department had spoken with CCA about it, and that the department had already released a forensic audit and implemented a technical assistance team to work in the district.  

Another parent whose story was included in the complaint, Caroline Lindsay, told the state Board of Education in January that her two daughters hadn’t received the services they needed. 

Lindsay said her younger daughter, who just completed first grade and has autism, spent more than 90% of her kindergarten year without a special education teacher. She explained to CT Mirror that without the necessary attention, she became more prone to meltdowns, biting and hitting while in school. Her daughter also failed to make progress toward her academic goals. 

Lindsay said at the state Board of Education meeting in January that her daughter was injured by classmates three times within three months. She told CT Mirror the girl was bit multiple times and got scratched on her face.

She said the district has agreed to place her daughter in a private school, but that the placement has been delayed because that school is also short-staffed. 

Lindsay’s older daughter, who just completed third grade, received services from a speech therapist that were “intermittent, at best,” she said. She told CT Mirror that over the past two years, the district only had a speech therapist for part of the year. 

“She is nonverbal and continues to struggle with communication of any kind, stunting her ability to connect socially and emotionally with her peers as well,” Lindsay told the Board of Education, adding that the district should be “ashamed” that its services were unreliable for the families who live in the community. 

Sarah Eagan, the executive director of the Center for Children’s Advocacy, told CT Mirror that the loss of special education services isn’t just an academic problem — it also puts children at risk. 

“ The denial of those services, the lack of a special education teacher, doesn’t just rob them of their civil rights to learn to speak, to learn to communicate, to learn to use the bathroom, to learn to make friends, to learn to understand and make academic progress — which is bad enough. It also leaves them in danger in their environment where they can be hurt — and are hurt,” she said. 

Although students who have missed services are supposed to have those services made up through compensatory time, the complaint said the district has failed to make up those hours in a timely fashion. 

Eagan said that while nearly every district in the state was dealing with staff shortage, the problem was particularly visible in Bridgeport.

Meyer said that a particular challenge in Bridgeport has been the ongoing administrative changes — the district has had six superintendents in the last nine years. 

A forensic audit of the school district, released last month, found that a lack of oversight from the Bridgeport Board of Education coupled with questionable budgeting practices had created an inaccurate portrait of the district’s finances. In response to a $39 million budget shortfall, the district has cut multiple positions, including assistant principals, librarians, kindergarten paraprofessionals and 20 teaching roles. 

The board voted in January to allow the state to intervene in the Bridgeport Public Schools by providing a “technical assistance team,” required training for district board members and having the state approve the district’s permanent hire for superintendent. 

The state has also expressed concern about the district’s ability to address special education needs, noting that the state was receiving an increased number of complaints and legal filings related to special education in Bridgeport.

The state has created a website documenting its interventions in Bridgeport Public Schools. 

As of February 2025, the district reported a shortage of 26 special education teachers and nine special education paraprofessionals. In a report from May 2025, the state Department of Education found that 75 of 89 one-on-one paraprofessional roles were being filled by a staffing agency that contracts with the district. 

The complaint also noted that teachers and staff were being pressured not to refer students to be evaluated for special education services, and staff were required to wait for administrative approval before they could recommend any services that would cost money — limiting the ability of a child’s special education team to make decisions collaboratively with the child’s parents. 

Correction:

An earlier version of this story misreported that a forensic audit last month found a lack of oversight by the state board of education. The lack of oversight found in the audit was on the part of Bridgeport’s board of education, not the state’s.