While D.C. public schools are not always an option for special needs children, the private schools to which children are referred aren’t always the better option.
Perhaps most famously, former Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee ordered the city to stop sending kids to the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts because school officials were electrically shocking children as a form of discipline.
Even after Rhee’s move, nine of the 11 D.C. students at the center remained when D.C. officials couldn’t find suitable new placements for them. The Washington Examiner first reported that city lawyers referred two more special needs students to the center after Rhee’s orders.
While the city has focused on better monitoring these placements, its current struggle has been getting its school bus system out from under federal court supervision. The District is not only required to pay private school tuition for special needs students it can’t serve, but also to bus them to the schools at an annual cost of $91.2 million.
And that doesn’t always go smoothly. On Tuesday, an 8-year-old boy with autism had to wait almost four hours for a bus to take him home. Dismissed at 2:15 p.m., the boy boarded his D.C. bus shortly after 6 p.m.
Brandon Frazier, a spokesman for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, said the dispatcher who failed to send the child’s bus — and then failed to send a bus later when his mother complained — was fired from the agency.
Frazier said the bus has arrived before dismissal 93 percent of days in the past two months.
Put under court monitoring in the 1990s for a number of additional issues, such as putting kids on buses that hadn’t been properly inspected, the city’s school bus depot is hoping to exit federal supervision in October. – Lisa Gartner
