Auditors fault special-ed data

The District’s Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) and public school system don’t know how many foster children receive special education, according to a government audit released yesterday.

The CFSA listed 359 foster children who were receiving special education, but the school system identified 701 foster children as special-education students.

What’s more, the names of only 82 students appeared on both the CFSA’s and the school system’s lists, according to a report by the D.C. Office of the Inspector General.

Auditors had sought to determine whether foster children were getting the required amount of special education during the 2004-05 school year. They concluded that shoddy record keeping by the CFSA and the school system made the task nearly impossible.

“The unreliability of CFSA’s special education records … affected our ability to fully accomplish our audit objective of accounting for children under CFSA’s custody who received special education services,” the auditors said in the report.

An upcoming inspector general report is expected to focus on whether the CFSA can account for all the foster children in its custody.

The auditors also noted that they “could not rely on or use records supplied” by the school system.

Among other findings of the report released by D.C. Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby, the auditors said the school system had included on its list several foster children who no longer were wards of the city and one who had died years earlier.

In addition, the inspector general sent 57 letters to residential-treatment facilities where the school system said students were receiving services. In 19 cases, children were not residing at the facilities, according to the audit.

Overall, more than 10,000 students receive special-education services at a cost of more than $100 million in the District, according to city records.

The audit concluded that school system and CFSA officials failed to execute written contracts for special-education services provided to foster children.

“CFSA and [the school system] did not effectively carry out their joint responsibility of accounting for children under CFSA’s custody who were in special education programs,” the auditors said.

The school system failed to maintain accurate information about CFSA children or where they were schooled, the audit reported.

The CFSA has failed to prepare a required annual report about the number of foster children in its care every year since a city law requiring the document went into effect in 2001.

“CFSA failed to comply with this legal reporting requirement for a number of reasons, including an apparent lack of regard for complying with District law,” the audit stated.

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