State sets deadline for Seattle Special Education - Seattle Schools ...

The Seattle Times reported today that the OSPI is giving Seattle Public Schools eighteen months to correct non-compliance in Special Education or lose federal funding.

Items of special note from the Times story:

• Doug Gill, the?state?s special-education director is quoted as saying "At some point you have to do the right thing." You may be surprised to learn that point doesn't come at the beginning, but only after several years of consistently doing the wrong thing. He makes it sound like doing the right thing is a great burden to him - or at least a severe inconvenience. What's he getting paid to ignore problems for years until the feds get involved?
  
• "School Board member Michael DeBell said the board should have made special education a higher priority sooner." Gee, if only someone had told them about the problems. You know, someone other than parents, IAs, teachers, and state and federal regulators. The only sources they regard as credible is the superintendent, the superintendent's cabinet, and the Alliance for Education.
  
• The state is requiring Seattle to establish a plan to fix the problems, but I notice that the state isn't requiring Seattle to enact the plan or implement it effectively. They only have to write the plan; they aren't required to deliver outcomes.
  
• Much of the trouble is rooted in the obscure lines of authority and responsibility. The special education department has no authority in a school, only the principal does. So the people with the responsibility for assuring the services are not the people with the authority to provide them. Yet another lesson in the need for responsibility and authority to be assigned together. That's pretty basic management, so this is another example of poor management.

Special Education, by the way, is not a Board priority this year, except as an element of equitable access. At the Board Retreat it was barely mentioned. The Strategic Plan makes little reference to it other than in the context of equitable access and academic assurances. None of the metrics for the Strategic Plan - and there are dozens and dozens of them - have anything to do with Special Education. Not one of the metrics on the proposed academic scorecard references Special Education. It simply is not on the radar.

All we know about the new delivery model for Special Education is that it has these labels:

Resource, Access, Behavior, Contained, and Distinct. The design is not finalized and it is subject to collective bargaining with the SEA. So we really don't know anything about it, but we're supposed to be confident because the institution that has consistently mucked it up and ignored it for years is now, just now, going to get serious about it. Yeah, right.

Source: http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2013/06/state-sets-deadline-for-seattle-special.html

lint buenos aires train crash argentina train crash nancy pelosi nancy pelosi gop debate republican debate