District of Columbia special education officials have failed to protect D.C.’s children and Mayor Adrian Fenty’s credibility should rest on whether he can reverse the abuse, the mayor’s top adviser said Wednesday.
“What we have now is a system where we don’t even know where the kids are,” said Peter Nickles, general counsel for Fenty. “I mean, kids move from charter schools to public schools and the records are so screwed up we don’t even know where the kids are.”
The city is under two consent decrees from class action suits filed over its disastrous system. Last week city officials announced a nearly $10 million agreement that requires the city to revamp its case management, school monitoring and student services.
Interviewed on WAMU’s “The Kojo Nnamdi Show,” Nickles, who will become acting attorney general for the District next year, said the Fenty administration ought to be judged by its ability to stick to the agreement’s deadlines.
“If we don’t meet them, we should be raked over the coals,” Nickles said. “We are now on the spot.”
Fentytook over the nearly $1 billion city school system in June, promising to open a new era of accountability and professionalism to the sputtering agency. But Fenty and his chancellor, Michelle Rhee, have struggled to keep their promises.
A centerpiece of critics’ complaints has been the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., the only clinic authorized to use “aversive therapy” like electric shocks. The Examiner was the first to report this week that a criminal investigation had been launched in Massachusetts after a runaway student from the center posed as a Rotenberg official and ordered three of his fellows hooked up to electricity in the middle of the night.
Despite Rotenberg officials’ assurances that the prank was an isolated incident and that the center works miracles on otherwise hopeless children, Nickles repeated his promise that D.C. would have its children out of Rotenberg by March.
D.C. special education
» Some 10,000 children
» $210 million-plus budget
» More due process lawsuits than all of the other states combined
Got a tip on special education? Call Bill Myers at 202-459-4956 or send e-mail to [email protected].
