An ambitious effort by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to create a school for some of the city’s most troubled students fell victim to poor planning and bureaucratic infighting, an Examiner investigation found.
The Transition Academy at Shadd Elementary School was touted as a centerpiece in Rhee’s efforts to redeem years of failures in dealing with traumatized or mentally ill students. It was to serve 175 teens and young adults who had been diagnosed as “emotionally disturbed.”
But by mid-October, federal court-appointed monitor Clarence Sundram, one of the world’s top experts on the treatment of the disabled, declared it a failure. “Shadd is a disaster,” he wrote to a colleague. “All of this bespeaks a lack of planning. ”
Shadd is only the latest in a string of setbacks as the city struggles to repair its $300 million special education system. For years, disturbed children had been crammed into “special education centers” around the city. Rhee promised that under her team of energetic staffers, things would be different.
“The emphasis of the school will be on accelerated academic study within a therapeutic milieu,” Rhee’s special education czar,
Phyllis Harris, wrote in a July 10 e-mail. “Staff working at Shadd are some of the best teachers, psychologists and social workers.”
But hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained by The Examiner tell a different story.
» Before Shadd opened, Rhee’s chief of staff, Lisa Ruda, reported it was “an extreme disappointment.” The “overall issue,” Ruda concluded Aug. 21, “is management.” Rhee’s team didn’t bother to hire enough staff, and kids were greeted by a nearly empty building that lacked teachers, textbooks or a school nurse. “The building was in no way ready to support our students,” Ruda wrote.
» Construction fell behind schedule, and Rhee’s team opened a school that it conceded was unsafe and infested with rats. “There is only one female custodian there and she is working alone trying to pull trash,” one special-ed bureaucrat wrote.
» There were frequent outbreaks of violence, including pitched hallway battles in which students hurled chairs and even fire extinguishers at each other and at staff, leading to several trips to hospitals. “[T]his school is unsafe for any student, and a breeding ground for lawsuits,” special-ed consultant Monique Bass wrote in October. “My [staff] are terrified for our children.”
» Bureaucrats in central headquarters were thrown into the breach without any experience in handling violent students. Staffers referred to Shadd as “Iraq.”
» Several students were injured when staff used what Bass called “inappropriate restraints.” By October, the state superintendent’s office was threatening to intervene. “I think we can’t sit on this and not act,” one superintendent’s office bureaucrat wrote.
On Oct. 27, Rhee beefed up Shadd’s staff, replaced its principal and reorganized the school day so that the students were surrounded at all time by therapists, teachers and aides. Rhee and top aides declined to be interviewed for this story.
But while things have calmed somewhat, Rhee is still under pressure to close Shadd. “If the plan is to continue with this type of program in the D.C. schools, I think it would be a good idea to consider a more suitable school building, in a more easily accessed location,” Sundram wrote to officials in December.
