Judge rips city on special-needs pupils

A federal judge has ruled that the District failed to comply with a two-year-old agreement to improve services for special-needs students and has set forth an exhaustive list of questions for Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to answer when she testifies Oct. 20, as the judge ordered last month.

In a harsh appraisal, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman wrote, “The District has not made those requirements a priority and has not tasked particular individuals … with day-to-day hands-on responsibility [for them] …

“Indeed, it is not even clear to the Court whether … it is [D.C. public schools] or the [Office of the State Superintendent of Education] that is responsible for implementing certain Consent Decree requirements.”

Judge Friedman also ordered State Superintendent Deborah A. Gist to appear before him with Mrs. Rhee.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, a Democrat, Mrs. Rhee and Mrs. Gist called an afternoon news conference Tuesday to stress their efforts to comply with the 2006 consent decree, issued by Judge Friedman to settle a nine-year class-action lawsuit, Blackman v. District of Columbia, brought by parents of special-needs children.

“It is really no understatement to say the entire team of experts we have working in the city government in education has been singularly focused on making sure that we improve our special education here in Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Fenty said.

“We are putting in place a number of initiatives to ensure that we can come into compliance with the consent decrees,” Mrs. Rhee said. “To really solve the problem and meet the spirit of the decrees, we have to build the capacity within our schools to serve the students well.”

The District has 16 special pilot schools, eight of which are special-education [school-wide application model] schools, said Richard Nyankori, a top aide to Mrs. Rhee. “A SAM school, at its heart, is just an inclusion model to make sure that every student is educated at their neighborhood school and [is] succeeding at the same levels with their non-disabled peers.

“We want to strengthen our system so we can bring more dollars to the classroom,” he said.

District taxpayers currently spend $200 million on private-school tuition for more than 2,300 special-needs students the public schools cannot handle.

Under the consent decree, the city is required to address its backlog of more than 1,000 cases on where to place individual special-needs students. The city was also directed to fix its long-broken data management system, which makes it difficult for parents to access their children’s files, and to hire more special-needs staff.

While the city has reduced the amount of backlogged students waiting for hearings, it has yet to fix the data systems, even after spending millions of dollars. The court also found that the District has failed to equip schools with adequate special-needs staff.

Mr. Fenty last year announced a new $6 million initiative to satisfy the decree. The District has 11,000 special-needs students.

Judge Friedman indicated that at the Oct. 20 hearing Mrs. Rhee and Mrs. Gist should be prepared to specify who has day-to-day responsibility for bringing the District into compliance with the consent decree, what staff and resources are available to them, what benchmarks are used to gauge their progress, and who reviews their performance and takes corrective action.

Last month, the District’s deputy chancellor for special education, Phyllis Harris, took a leave of absence for unspecified reasons. Mrs. Rhee denied reports that she had been fired. Her departure came just weeks after Judge Friedman first criticized D.C. public schools for failing to satisfy his consent decree.