D.C. school officials have turned to a familiar face to help rescue them from their special education crisis.
Statistician and arts patron Rebecca Klemm is a longtime consultant with the public schools who has spent the past decade as part of a court-appointed monitoring team overseeing the city’s failing, $306 million special education system.
Her company will now be paid $100,000 per month for six months and another $167,000 in expenses to help reduce the backlog of children waiting to be tested and served by special education bureaucrats.
It’s part of a nearly $8 million effort, announced Tuesday by State Superintendent Deborah L. Gist, that D.C. officials promise will finally get them atop of their special education crises.
The Examiner has written extensively on D.C.’s problems serving its mentally ill and disabled children. The city is under two different consent decrees because it consistently fails to meet federal deadlines on testing, treating and paying to help ill or disabled children confront their handicaps.
Klemm is probably best known as a patron of the arts and a fine-dining gourmet. She sits on boards of numerous theater and arts groups. Her fundraisers on behalf of arts in the public schools are must-have tickets for D.C. culture vultures. Her private collection of artwork was featured in the spring 2002 issue of the magazine American Style.
Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration is banking on Klemm’s creativity to pull it out of the quagmire. She has provided quarterly updates on the stagnant system to the federal courts for more than a decade. Her new six-month contract, revealed in court earlier this month, means she’ll no longer be tracking the backlog of unserved students; she’ll be fighting it.
“Changing a culture,” Klemm told The Examiner in an e-mail, when asked to describe what she’s up against. “We are here to serve students and families before complaints begin.”
The optimism is not universal. At this month’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said he was worried that Gist and schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee were ducking their own responsibilities and making Klemm pick up for them.
And some are worried that Fenty’s focus on the specialeducation backlog misses the larger structural problems that created the backlog.
“It’s all very well to clear up the backlog,” said Mary Levy, a schools expert for the Washington Lawyers Committee. “But then you have to provide the services. And that’s been a problem since … 1972.”
