Community Voices: A Confidentiality Investigation Is Open. The Bigger Questions About OAL Remain Unanswered.

My name is Kai Collins, and I have become somewhat of a self-proclaimed education rights strategist due to my family’s experience inside the American education system.

I am also the Director of Special Education at the New Jersey Coalition for Learners and co-host of the education accountability podcast Insured to Fail EDU.

My family and I live in Holmdel, New Jersey. We moved here in 2017 for the school district. Holmdel is known for its high-performing schools, high property taxes, and extensive special education programs and services.

Unfortunately, my family has been engaged in an ongoing due process dispute with the Holmdel Board of Education since 2022 involving our now 12-year-old daughter.

We are seeking accountability for what we believe were Child Find violations and an appropriate placement at The Academy NJ, a specialized school program located in Holmdel. The district continues to oppose all claims through counsel.

As I took over navigating multiple and compounding legal and administrative matters without representation, I began encountering broader concerns regarding the integrity of New Jersey’s special education administrative process. What started as a fight for my daughter gradually evolved into questions about the systems families must rely upon to obtain accountability in the first place.

Those concerns intensified after the New Jersey Office of Special Education opened an investigation into a confidentiality breach involving the disclosure of another family’s recording from a special education proceeding. While the Office of Special Education accepted the confidentiality complaint for investigation into the Office of Administrative Law, it has declined to address the broader questions raised by the incident itself, including how recordings are created, retained, preserved, accessed, and disclosed.

Over the past several weeks, I have made four separate attempts to obtain confirmation, clarification, acknowledgement, and review of those broader administrative record concerns. To date, I have received no response from anyone within the State government.

The issue extends far beyond my family’s cases. During our own due process proceedings, we were advised that teleconferences were “not on the record” and later proceeded through litigation without transcripts. However, recordings from other proceedings conducted before the same Administrative Law Judge during the same period were later produced and disclosed by the State. That naturally raises questions about whether recording and retention practices are being applied consistently and whether families are being provided equal access to the records that ultimately become the basis for administrative and judicial decisions.

My concerns extend beyond recordings alone. They include questions about what records are created, what records are preserved, who has access to them, what standards govern their retention or destruction, and whether those practices are applied uniformly. They also include concerns regarding incomplete records transmitted for judicial review, missing filings, illegible documents, and the barriers self-represented families face when attempting to review and challenge administrative records on appeal. Most importantly, the confidentiality breach itself appears to be treated as an isolated event, while the underlying administrative record practices that made the breach possible remain unexamined. If a recording was improperly disclosed, then the public has a right to understand how that recording came to exist, how it was retained, who had access to it, and whether similar records exist in other matters.

Parents, attorneys, advocates, courts, and the public should be able to rely on the integrity, completeness, and accessibility of the administrative record in proceedings that determine a child’s educational rights, services, and placement. When the record itself becomes the subject of uncertainty, confidence in the process is undermined.

I make no money from this work. My interest is purely education access and accountability. Education should not require families to purchase expertise simply to obtain rights that already exist under the law. Accountability should belong to the people, not only to those who can afford attorneys.

I am seeking transparency regarding the policies governing the creation, retention, preservation, and production of records in New Jersey special education administrative proceedings, as well as an independent review of whether those policies are being applied consistently. I believe public confidence in the administrative process depends upon a complete, reliable, and equally accessible record for all participants.

Submitted directly by the author; content reflects their own views

Editor’s Note: NJ21st reviewed documents provided by Kai Collins, including her May 5 formal complaint, the Office of Special Education’s May 6 acceptance letter, follow-up correspondence and a timeline of events. The documents verify that Collins filed a complaint involving the alleged improper disclosure of another family’s recording, that OSE accepted the complaint for investigation under a confidentiality-related issue and that Collins repeatedly asked the State to also review broader questions involving recording practices, record retention and the completeness of administrative records.