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From our news partners at The Seattle Times: Communication failures both within Seattle Public Schools and with parents of children with disabilities continue to undermine the district's efforts to fix longstanding problems in special education. By John Higgins.
More than year after the state ordered Seattle Public Schools to fix its long-troubled special-education program, progress has been incremental at best and falls far short of the district's own promises.
When national consultants visited Seattle during the spring, they found a bureaucracy still so disjointed that few know who is responsible for what.
They heard, for example, four different versions of how the district is supposed to handle parent complaints about special education.
The data systems are such a mess that nobody could tell them how many of the district's 7,200 special-education students — with disabilities such as autism, deafness and dyslexia — were in school on any given day.
Some staff couldn't even name the department's executive director, Zakiyyah McWilliams — not especially surprising, given that she is the eighth person to hold the job in five years.
Now there's a ninth. McWilliams, after a little over a year on the job, was sent home on paid leave last month and replaced by an interim leader pending a district investigation into the contracting process that brought the consultants to Seattle in the first place.
Seattle risks losing about $12 million annually in federal funds unless it fixes problems that include failures to update student learning plans, deliver services outlined in those plans and provide services consistently from school to school.
While McWilliams and her staff have made some gains in the timeliness and quality of student learning plans and evaluations, they weren't able to meet the state's June 30 deadline to have the full improvement plan in place.
The state has given Seattle another year to fix those basic problems.
Parents want more than basic competence, however. They want more attention paid to boosting academics, raising graduation rates and improving the chances that their children can live independently once they leave school.
Also wanting more is the U.S. Department of Education, which announced in June that it will now judge special-education programs on educational results as well as procedural compliance.
And poor communication — within the district and with parents, especially those who don't speak English — continues to undermine Seattle's efforts.
Communication is one of four main problems identified by the consultants — the TIERS Group from Louisiana State University — along with frequent leadership turnover, chaotic internal organization and insufficient training for principals and teachers.
