From our news partners at The Seattle Times: Seattle Public Schools has been ordered to fix many longstanding problems in its special-education program or risk losing control of $11 million in special-education funding — or the money itself.
Seattle Public Schools has 18 months to fix persistent problems in its special-education programs, or risk losing millions of dollars in federal special-education funding or control over how it can spend that money.
The state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) set the deadline after years of warnings.
The district, state officials say, is failing to keep an accurate count of its special-education students, doesn’t ensure that all students who qualify for special-education services receive them, and often doesn’t follow the academic plans all such students must have. That’s just a sampling.
Most important, they say, the same problems keep cropping up, with the district addressing an issue at one school, only to have it recur the next year in other schools, and yet other schools the next.
“This isn’t just fixing a couple of files, it’s fixing the entire system so it is more uniform, so it is more responsive to the needs of kids,” said Doug Gill, the state’s special-education director.
No other Washington school district in at least 20 years has faced such a strong possibility of state intervention, Gill said.
Seattle’s special-education leaders don’t dispute the state’s findings, saying they’ve been aware of them for almost a year and are nearly done with a plan to attend to them.
