The District of Columbia will spend nearly $137 million in fiscal 2008 to send about 2,000 children to outside schools for special education services they may not need, a scathing draft report by an independent research group has determined.
When the high cost of transporting the children is factored in, D.C. will spend about $82,000 per child, an “especially excessive” amount onits face, the American Institutes for Research concluded in its study of D.C.’s stricken special education system.
A draft of the report, which won’t be made public until later this month, was obtained by The Examiner.
The report also raises the disturbing possibility that many of the students in those outside schools shouldn’t be there.
“There remains the concern that students in [outside] schools do not appear to be as severe as public school students,” the authors concluded.
Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and State Superintendent Deborah Gist have ordered a top-to-bottom review of the special education system and asked the D.C. inspector general and attorney general to look for evidence of fraud, several sources told The Examiner.
Under federal law, children can be sent to outside schools, at public expense, if they can prove their local schools can’t meet their needs.
The Examiner has written extensively about the waste and abuse in the D.C. “non-public” tuition program, which throws hundreds of millions of public dollars each year at schools outside the city with little concern for the safety or welfare of the children in the system. About 2,000 special education students are sent to facilities from Florida to Colorado each year. Dozens of those vulnerable children have ended up in schools in Florida and Massachusetts that have been the subject of numerous allegations of abuse and neglect.
Rhee has said publicly that she wants to keep D.C. children in the D.C. schools. But she has also been told by outside auditors that she doesn’t have enough money in her $1 billion budget to do so. According to top education sources, Rhee is considering asking the District Council for tens of millions of extra public dollars to carry out her reforms.
The American Institutes report raises questions about whether children are being shipped off to pricey outsideschools as an easy way out for the city. Since 2001, placements in “non-public” schools from D.C. has risen by 131 percent, the authors found.
Education leaders said they weren’t surprised by the report’s findings, but expressed hope it would finally make special education reform a top public policy question.
“I would hope that Deborah Gist and Michelle Rhee will develop a much more rigorous plan than what we’ve had before,” said Robert Bobb, president of the D.C. State Board of Education. “There have been 20 different plans for special education. And we need a single plan that finally gets to the issues.”
The draft report also took aim at St. Coletta of Greater Washington, a formerly private school for the severely disabled that was opened as a public charter school last year. St. Coletta, which has relied on congressional earmarks for most of its history, was given a 99-year lease on public land for $1 per year in the hopes it could help rescue D.C. from its special education crisis.
The report’s authors found that St. Coletta hasn’t reached the District’s neediest children, despite its high costs, and has only given “an appearance of progress” in “moving children from private to public schools.”
St. Coletta officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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