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Dozens of Staten Island parents of special needs students packed a meeting Tuesday to talk about how the Department of Education can better serve their kids, who suffer from learning disabilities like dyslexia or developmental disorders like autism. For the nearly 30 parents who spoke, the common theme was frustration.

“There's nothing on Staten Island that I know of that will meet my son's needs and most of your children's needs. The learning disabled, the extremely functioning autistic population, it's not there. And instead of the Board of Ed trying to fix it, they hire more attorneys to fight the parents,” said Frank Schimenti, a parent.

“Ninety percent of the parents don't really know what services they can and cannot receive,” said Andrea Lella, a parent.

An advocacy group, Action for Reform in Special Education, or ARISE, is hoping to change that. ARISE is pushing for a systemwide change in the way the New York City Department of Education handles these cases.

Meetings like this one are being held throughout the city and advocates plan to present what they've learned to education officials. In the entire city, there are roughly 190,000 students with special needs, and the DOE said there are close to 12,000 on Staten Island.

“Parents feeling very unsupported in their work with their own kids. That they know their kids, they know their strengths, their weaknesses. That they know would like to see, but they don't feel that they're getting that same support from the department of education. They feel segregated, they feel like they're pushed aside, treated like second class citizens,” said Maggie Moroff, ARISE.

A representative from the Department of Education's Office of Special Education Initiatives attended the meeting, but declined to speak on camera.

The DOE said it is working on the problem, pointing to a new program that will track individualized education programs, or IEP’s online.

The DOE said the system will “allow principals and other school personnel to access and update student files quickly and securely and will also allow the DOE to provide families of students with disabilities with better and more timely information."

Parents said the computerized system is a good first step. But still, they said more needs to be done.