"They would be calling my personal phone, my work phone. They were calling my husband, who works nights," said Manwell, a resource planner at Ford Motor Company. "It was impossible. I couldn't function. I never knew when they were going to call or what was going to happen."

An official from the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools district in Michigan where John goes to school said he couldn't comment on specific student issues, citing federal student privacy law.

"The remedy isn't, 'You just can't go to school.' The law was enacted 50 years ago to prevent this very outcome – that students with disabilities aren't allowed to go to school and participate in an education."

Federal law protects students with disabilities from being repeatedly disciplined or removed from school for behaviors related to their disability. If they are suspended for more than 10 days, families are entitled to a meeting with the school to determine whether the behaviors are a result of the child's disability. If so, then the school must offer adjustments instead of suspension. For example, if a child's disability makes it difficult for them to focus in a loud classroom with dozens of other children, the parent has the right to request a quieter classroom or one with fewer children.

The Education Department's July guidance made clear that children who are informally removed have the same rights, such as reviews of whether the student's behavior was a result of their disability, as those who have been officially suspended.

Tricia Ellinger says she would have requested a hearing to make sure her 10-year-old daughter Cassie was getting appropriate services and support, had she known that her frequent removals from the classroom amounted to suspensions.

One day last spring, she received three phone calls in rapid succession, telling her to immediately pick up Cassie from Kenneth J. Carberry Elementary School in Emmett, Idaho. When she arrived, her daughter was sitting quietly in the school's resource room eating a snack. She says a school staff member told her that Cassie was refusing to do her work and needed to go home.

"When I got her in the car, I asked her, 'Cass, what happened? Did you tear up your notebook, did you throw your pencil?'" Ellinger recalled. "She said, 'No, it was just hard. Math is hard.'"

The call was one of about 20 Ellinger says she got last year from the school, which is designed specifically to educate students with disabilities. She says her daughter was also taken out of class repeatedly and kept in a room by herself. None of the removals were recorded as suspensions.

Emmett School District Superintendent Craig Woods said he couldn't comment, citing federal student privacy law.

Families often do not know what grounds they have to lodge a complaint, Lhamon said. Sometimes they aren't aware their child should not have been suspended in the first place.

"That is so concerning when schools are excluding students for reasons that are unlawful," she said. "We want our kids to be in class, learning with other students, fully participant and respected as learners. We do not want our school communities to be sending a message that there's some category of kids who can't be there."

Manwell said most of the calls she got last year from her son’s school were a result of bullying. On the fourth day of school John got shoved in the locker room, and she got a call to pick him up. Another time, he went to the bathroom and another student threatened to beat him up.

Because of his disability, John was supposed to be granted access to a quiet room so he could recover from difficult incidents. But often, she said, either there wasn’t a room or when he didn’t want to return to class, she’d get a call to come pick him up.

“It was just the stress of never knowing what I was sending my kid into each day. I was worrying the whole time he was gone,” said Manwell. “I could see the damage.”

“He was withdrawing. He started talking about hurting himself,” she said, her voice breaking.

In January, she made the decision to switch John to homebound instruction, sending him to a tutoring center every day for a couple of hours and rearranging her work schedule. It made her life more predictable, she said, and John began to act like his old self.

She said she’d like to send him back to school but doesn’t trust what will happen.

“You want to protect your kids, right?” she said. “I just can’t send him to a school where he won’t be safe.”•

This story www.hechingerreport.org/when-your-disability-gets-you-sent-home-from-school was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.