Charter schools in New Orleans have a poor record when it comes to making sure students with disabilities get the services they need.
The city’s almost all-charter district has been subject to outside special education monitoring as part of a class action lawsuit for nearly a decade — and advocates argue it needs to continue.
Students with disabilities are entitled to a free, appropriate education under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
While it's a charter’s responsibility to provide the necessary services, Jennifer Coco, with The Center for Learner Equity, said New Orleans' decentralized system can place an “unfair burden” on individual schools to be “anything and everything a kid with a disability might need.”
Coco highlights the long-standing frustrations of schools and families in a report published this week. She takes things further, posing a possible solution to stakeholders: Have schools share resources by forming what’s known as an educational service agency.
It’s a type of public agency that allows educational entities across a region to team up and “coordinate services they all need, but are all a little bit too small to do,” she said.
Charter leaders appear open to the idea.
Almost 75% of school leaders surveyed answered “yes,” when asked if the approach would improve their ability to educate kids with disabilities. More than a dozen schools formed a working group in May to explore creating an agency with NOLA Public Schools, the city’s school district, Coco said.
While Louisiana doesn’t have any educational service agencies, the arrangement is common in other states and something charter schools have used before.
School board members are expected to vote Thursday on whether to design and pilot an agency with interested schools.
‘Inefficient’ system harms kids
In a traditional school district, specialized programs are often centralized, and not every school offers a full menu of services in-house.
But in New Orleans’ nearly all-charter system, parents decide where their kids attend which means the city’s highest-needs students are often spread out. Because of this, the report describes the system as “siloed” and “inefficient” in educating students with disabilities.
“The redundancy in our system’s current design creates challenges for building the necessary size and scope to sustain special education programs that meet the needs of all students with disabilities,” the report said.
Some larger charter management organizations have solved this by pooling resources, much like a traditional school district.
The report notes that, as a result, the problem is felt more acutely by smaller organizations.
“We are way overspending,” said the CEO of a single-site school in the report, placing the amount at more than $500,000 a year. “This isn’t really going to be sustainable,” they add. “And you need to start thinking about outsourcing more and not having a full-time [staff].”
Families who participated in focus groups explained how the issue affects kids directly.
“We’re not continuing with the school that we chose because of their lack of services,” one parent said. “The teacher was wonderful. But the administration failed.”
Multiple parents noted a lack of speech-language pathologists in particular.
One parent said it took six months for her son’s school to hire a provider. Another said after her daughter's therapy stopped, she “backtracked, regressed” and “developed a stutter.”
‘Knot worth untangling’
District officials have already centralized several processes that produced significant inequities when left up to individual schools, including student enrollment and expulsion.
School board member Carlos Zervigon said special education also makes sense.
“Our role is to solve district-wide problems,” he said. “Schools are having trouble going it alone and they want to do a better job.”
But that doesn’t mean the district should “take over” special education, he said.
Instead, he sees centralization as an opportunity for the central office to coordinate resources across schools and provide some services directly, like employing scarce specialists so they can more easily reach the kids who need them.
The report highlights other benefits an agency could provide, including:
- A database of student records to make things easier if they switch schools
- Shared assistive technology and other equipment
- A centralized Medicaid billing system
- Shared providers for speech, physical and occupational therapy
- A formal network of specialized programming hosted by partner schools
While the benefits are likely appealing, the report acknowledges the challenges of getting schools to sign on.
“School stakeholders are unwilling to sacrifice autonomy for centralization,” the report said. “NOLA Public Schools should guarantee charter autonomy over decision-making and provide options for engagement to respect charter schools’ existing autonomy.”
An answer to that could be creating an advisory board, Coco said, with members from participating schools who determine things like the agency’s budget, staffing and financing.
“It really behooves us to figure out a model where schools would be reallocating resources in a true fee-for-service model,” she said. “That really ups the ante on this. This entity needs something to offer to schools that's attractive and affordable and meets their needs.”
Any arrangement involving the district and participating charter schools will be complicated, logistically and legally, but it’s a “knot worth untangling,” Coco said, adding officials have known for nearly 15 years that the system is preventing children with disabilities from reaching their full potential.
“It is time to try something unique and hard because it matters to these kids,” she said.
And with the Orleans Parish School Board operating a school directly again, Zervigon said it should consider participating in that way too.
“We should be the first to sign up,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s going to be very inefficient and costly to provide special education.”
