Naw, Really? Now What?
Folks, locals and others, have been shouting this since the schools reopened but now the Times-Picayune has discovered…wait…TA-DAH!—”Special needs students aren’t in charters” [Times-Picayune print edition, 2-1-2010]/”Equal treatment for special-needs students in short supply at New Orleans public schools” [nola.com, your temporary NFL Super Bowl whoresite]
In the rush to fill in what was seen as a “clean slate” created by the evacuation of some and removal of other parents and teachers from the city, certain things were ignored. Like a bewildering complexity. Like experimentation and innovation. Like special-needs students. I suppose they were to be served after the reforms? By a last-resort “safety” net? Or was reform meant for all but special-needs students whose test scores aren’t as helpful?
A report presented to the state board of education last week shows wide, and stubborn, gaps in the number of students with special needs at the city’s public schools — particularly the independently operated charter schools.
If BESE had this information, or suspected it, before the recent no vote on an Opelousas charter, that could partially explain, or I sure hope partially explains, the coolness to charters that vote implied.
And this only has teeth if Vallas stays but if he does and it did, it could be a game-changer:
“While I strongly support charters, I will not hesitate to recommend non-renewal if a charter has not made significant progress at admitting its fair share of special ed students,” said Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas.
It is in many cases a matter of resources—-when you are an independent charter school, you do not have a district to depend on to provide testing, technology, teachers who serve children in more than one school, and that kind of sharing makes it more financially and logistically feasible.
“A student with autism might be told, ‘We don’t really help kids with autism here because we don’t have the staff or the resources,’” [Melissa] Losch [managing attorney of the special education legal group for the Advocacy Center] said.
…
And in some cases it’s easy to sympathize with both the parents and the schools: Families have every right to full services, but schools cannot always get the money and staff they need to provide them.
“It is extremely difficult to expect one little, individual charter school that has 100 to 150 students to be able to accept and meet the needs of every child with every kind of disability,” [Kathy] Kilgore [director of the SUNS (Serving the Unique Needs of Students) Center of the School Leadership Center] said. She cited one charter school that accepted a child with a severe disability who needs personal transportation to school every day. But the school receives only half of the money it needs to pay for the transportation.
Which means that fracturing the system has created an atmosphere in which it is harder to serve special-needs students, not easier.
And which also means that starting and running a school takes more than bright smiles and a cheery, go-getter disposition.
—–
RSD has a “new special education collaborative offers professional development and networking to interested schools.” How new?
