D.C. schools and special ed plaintiff’s lawyers seek truce
After tangling in litigation for close to a decade, the District of Columbia school system agreed in 2006 to work quickly to pare down a backlog of cases related to special education services it had failed to provide to students with disabilities. Two years after the decision in the class action, the backlog of cases is still large, and growing. School district officials acknowledge they’ve missed most of the deadlines imposed in the Blackman-Jones consent decree, named for the plaintiffs in two cases that were ultimately merged. But school officials and lawyers representing the plaintiffs have decided to put aside further legal action for now. Much of the change has been spurred by the arrival of Michelle A. Rhee, the new schools chancellor. The work hasn’t always been pleasant, people involved say. In conversations described by one school official as “gut-wrenching,” district leaders have agreed that the special education system has been broken for years.
The “alternative dispute resolution,” reached last December, does not carry the same legal weight as the consent decree, but it outlines broader goals that the school district has committed to carrying out. Together, the parties have come up with plans to strengthen the district’s fragmented case-management system by using 30 case managers to provide intensive services to 500 students. Among other changes: By the start of the 2008-09 school year, eight elementary schools and eight middle schools will be designated “exemplary” schools providing full-service, inclusionary education for students with disabilities. The district also plans to create open seats for students with disabilities at well-regarded schools by paying those schools a stipend, above and beyond the standard per-pupil allocation, based on how many students they accept. Principals will be free to use that money for other services within their buildings. Negotiations between the school system and the lawyers led to the creation of a team of five school officials that pores over each request for a due-process hearing. Those come in at a rate of a dozen or so per day. The officials are authorized to break down barriers and offer settlements to parents on the spot. Private placements for students with disabilities, some costing tens of thousands of dollars a year, are also under review. For fiscal 2007, the school system paid $118 million in tuition for out-of-district placements, out of a total budget of about $1 billion. The work relies not only on the goodwill of the lawyers and the district officials, but on U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman, who issued the consent decree. He has allowed the parties some latitude, but has the right to hold the school system in contempt if it continues to fail to meet the deadlines imposed in the decree. “Clearing the backlog is not the same as educational reform,” said Richard J. Nyankori, the special assistant to the chancellor who is part of the team that reads through the complaints. “The core of the problem is creating a stronger general education system.”
Source: Education Week, 5/15/08, by Christina A. Samuels
[Editor’s Note: The full article excerpted above includes a chart of the backlog of cases and whether, and by how long, they are overdue. For background, see below.]
NSBA School Law pages on Blackman/Jones consent decree