Confidentiality clauses will be eliminated from agreements with parents of special education students.
By Vicky Shere / Special to the Malibu Times
Ending a year of controversy, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Board of Education voted last Thursday to drop confidentiality clauses in agreements with parents of special education students.
The move paves the way for the Santa Monica City Council to restore a $530,000 increase in the city’s annual contribution to the school district that it threatened to withhold last summer.
Including confidentiality clauses in agreements on a student’s Individual Education Plan (IEP) had been roundly criticized since last May, when parents told the Santa Monica City Council they lived in fear of losing extra services for their children through an inadvertent slip of the tongue.
Entered into after there is a breakdown in negotiations for an IEP, settlement agreements are seen as one way to avoid a costly legal battle. Confidentiality clauses bar parents from speaking to a third party about services their child receives.
“Something else must be put in its place,” Malibu resident Laureen Sills said about the settlement agreement process in public comments at Santa Monica City Hall.
A statewide special education parent activist, Sills recently wrote in a column printed in The Malibu Times that while settlement agreements addressed costly dispute resolution, services can be left out of the child’s IEP [which, under federal law, enables disabled children to receive free appropriate public education]. The confidentiality aspect “invites the settlement agreement process to be accessed by the educated and informed, and leaves out the less advantaged families,” Sills, a founder of the Malibu Special Education Foundation, wrote.
“It’s unfair to ask parents to withhold information that could be beneficial to other parents,” Sills explained in a telephone interview Monday. “There must be a better way to save money for special education.”
The board first placed a moratorium on confidentiality clauses last summer but they were still allowed in settlement agreements if requested by parents.
A total of 37 agreements have been entered into since the moratorium was enacted in July 2007, with 28 of them having a confidentiality clause requested by the parent, Mike Matthews, assistant superintendent for human resources, said. There was no evidence that the moratorium was violated.
Matthews was among a number of school officials who suggested that the confidentiality clauses be eliminated all together.
“The concern I have is [that] as long as we allow people to request those confidentiality clauses, it will always be called into question,” he said. “This district does not need questions being asked about our integrity.”
In addition to the ban, a number of changes will be made in the school district in response to an independent audit on special education required by the council.
The audit by the firm Lou Barber & Associates, released in March, encouraged the district to allow schools, rather than the district’s central office, to have control over the special education program.
Following the resignation [which Sills calls firing] of Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District Deputy Superintendent Tim Walker earlier this month, special education services will now fall under district Chief Academic Officer Sally Chou.
A certified mediator will be contracted to resolve disputes that arise in IEP negotiations.
“We’re hoping that’s not the route we would take because we would like to use a more collaborative format to move forward,” Chou said during the school board meeting.
The board authorized Superintendent Dianne Talarico to form a committee, consisting of a broad selection of stakeholders, to create new policies and procedures in the special education program. The measure follows the lead of San Ramon Valley Unified School District, which went through a similar ordeal and shared their experiences with the board this month.
At the suggestion of board member and Malibu resident Kathy Wisnicki, the board will expedite the review of the Special Education Parent/Student handbook prepared by the Special Education District Advisory Committee. The handbook will be released in the fall of 2008, with parent informational workshops in both Santa Monica and Malibu.
The board will contract with an external monitor to provide quarterly progress reports on implementing the district’s comprehensive three-to-five year plan for the district’s special education program.