The collapse at Shadd Elementary School set back D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s broader reform plans for the city’s moribund special education system, internal documents show.
By pulling bureaucrats away from their desks to stand guard in the violent hallways at Shadd, the city fell way behind in helping other special needs services, e-mails show.
The work piled up and the city’s $300 million-plus special education system, already under two federal court consent decrees, fell into further chaos.
By September, the system was “stretched beyond capacity,” one official wrote in an e-mail.
“However … the situation @ Shadd is extremely fragile,” the official added. “As such, we cannot afford to move any adults at this time.”
Federal law sets strict deadlines for testing and treating ill and disabled children. Even in its best years, D.C. has struggled to meet those deadlines, which has allowed special education lawyers to create a cottage industry in due process lawsuits. D.C. has more special-ed lawsuits than all 50 states combined.
Rhee and her staff designed Shadd in part to prevent further litigation and to keep children out of expensive private schools.
Rhee’s chief of staff, Lisa Ruda, had seen in Shadd a potential “beacon of success for our neediest population.”
But the Shadd crisis allowed lawsuits to begin percolating through the system. Within weeks of opening Shadd, the city agreed to transfer 10 students from Shadd to private schools.
In late September, longtime Rhee aide Richard Nyankori was asked when staff would be released from Shadd.
“Soon,” he wrote, “its kilin’ [sic] us.”
In November, school officials met with plaintiffs’ lawyers to discuss the city’s ongoing special-ed crisis. Asked whether they would consider closing Shadd down, officials said no. “Expensive,” the meeting notes state.
