Other recommendations presented to board of education include increasing communication efforts to the special education community; hiring a full-time integration director, a special needs liaison and a communications specialist.
By Nora Fleming / Special to The Malibu Times
The Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District Board of Education last Thursday responded to a summary of a volunteer working group’s recommendations on how to improve the district’s special education program, which has been vehemently targeted the past few years by various stakeholders for an overhaul.
Earlier this year, the City of Santa Monica released roughly $700,000 in funds they had been withholding from the district since 2007, until the district proved they were taking action to remedy the program.
The 40-page report, an effort of the Special Education Collaborative: the Working Group, comprised of 18 parents and staff from both cities that has met 10 times since November, highlighted seven target areas where the district can make improvements, including: building an inclusive/integrated community; staffing; the Individual Education Plan process; equitable access to services; communications systems and Web sites; early identification of special needs students and the programs offered to those students.
Overall, inclusion, the IEP process and the district’s program offerings were pinpointed as focal points for concentrated action by the district.
But while some of the working group’s suggestions, such as increasing communication efforts to the special education community, are more effort- than cost-based, others, such as hiring a full-time integration director, a special needs liaison and a communications specialist, would cost the district a fair amount of money at a time when they are hoping to slash several million from next year’s budget and already have a hiring freeze in place.
While no fiscal analysis was generated with the report, working group members and several board members agreed that strengthening the overall program could save the district money in the long run, particularly in the costs the district has spent for out-of-district service providers and steep legal fees.
Since 2004, the money the district has spent on special education has increased annually, though the number of students and parents satisfied with the program has declined, said Craig Hamilton, a member of the working group and the district’s Financial Oversight Committee, as well as a parent of a special needs student, in an interview with The Malibu Times after the meeting.
Additionally, the district has not used all funds allocated toward the special education program each year since 2004, Hamilton said, with the unspent amount, totaling close to $5.4 million, going back into district reserves, some of which is now being considered for use to remedy the financial crisis.
“The current budgeting practices in special education are not an effective financial management tool,” Hamilton said. “We believe doing the work in building capacity [and] creating programs within the district will move things to be more cost effective and create a less contentious environment, therefore saving money in legal costs.”
This year, more than $22 million, roughly 18 percent of the overall budget, was allocated for special education, half of which came from state and federal sources. There are currently 1,380 special education students in the district, roughly 12 percent of the total 11, 565 student population.
While the report on the whole was well received, the issue of settlement agreements, or agreements between parents and the district for additional remediation services provided to special needs students, and their relationship to the IEP process, still remains a source of angst for some parents and members of the working group.
Each year, special needs students go through an IEP process, required by federal law, in which parents and staff develop a school district-backed support program of services for a student, based on a needs assessment. If parents do not agree with the plan, they have the option of scheduling additional meetings, and sometimes taking a legal route, to obtain additional services from the district. This can result in a settlement agreement between the parents and school district for services that stands as a separate document from the IEP.
Both the working group members and many parents believe the terms of these services should be put back into a student’s IEP to keep school sites better informed of services promised to the student and protect these services by federal education law.
An independent audit of the district’s special education program, conducted by Lou Barber & Associates at the request of the Santa Monica City Council and released last year, revealed that due to a poor IEP process, the district was having parents sign far too many settlement agreements and used the system as an immediate course of action when there were disputes over services, rather than improving the overall process at individual site levels. The city council had requested the district to place a moratorium on confidentiality clauses in these agreements, which the audit said created an environment of “secret deals.”
To the chagrin of working group members and parents in the community, the superintendent has recommended the district not include contract services from settlement agreements into the IEPs.
“Unless we put the settlement agreements back into the IEPs, this whole exercise was for naught and it still feels like it’s not all honest and we’re not all working together,” said Suzy Forman, a Malibu parent who served on the working group. “If there’s going to be transparency, this absolutely, 100 percent needs to be done. It’s a huge sticking for everybody [in the working group].”
So far this year, roughly 25 to 30 settlement agreements have been signed, Hamilton said.
The efforts of the group are a portion of the district’s overhaul push for reform of the program that has included increased community input and several initiatives over the past year. There have also been significant changes in leadership of administrators involved with the district’s special education program, with the resignation of Special Education Director Ruth Valadez most recently.
The Special Education Spring Forum will take place Saturday, 8:30 a.m. to noon, in the John Adams Middle School Cafeteria in Santa Monica.