The Department of Education (DOE) is in the midst of changing the way schools handle special education students, but some parents and education officials are worried schools—especially in overcrowded Queens districts—aren’t ready to handle the impact by next school year.
The reform is designed to give students with individual education needs access to their locally zoned schools.
Currently, special education pupils travel to buildings with programs and classes designed to host them.
The DOE wants every school to have the ability to handle those students.
Chancellor Dennis Walcott has said the goal is to create equity of access across the board and integrate students with individual needs into normal classrooms as much as possible.
Nobody is speaking out against the goal of the plan. Most agree that integrating as much as possible and holding special education students to higher academic standards is desirable.
And the students will have individualized education plans tailored to their needs—whether it’s physical, mental, emotional or learning disabilities.
It’s the process that’s made waves.
“It’s a model and reform that needs to be done,” said Dmytro Fedkowskyj, the Queens representative to the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP). “We’re just not ready to do it at this scale yet.”
Queens suffers from very crowded districts. DOE representatives have called District 24 in particular the most overcrowded in the city.
By expecting local schools to potentially take special needs students so quickly, Fedkowskyj worries resources will be stretched thinner.
There’s no way of knowing yet, he added, just how many special education students will apply to their local schools, he said. Fedkowskyj and Queens Borough President Helen Marshall want a more defined plan for what’s going to happen just a few months away.
“Borough President Marshall and I are concerned about the implementation of this reform on a system wide-basis, since it lacked deep communication within our school communities,” he said. “This reform, as it grows, will have an effect on every student, teacher and principal in every school, which can lead to good outcomes, but in order to do that culture changes have to take place within our school communities. A plan on how to do that wasn’t defined.”
Fedkowskyj and the PEP have a limited roll in this process though.
The DOE decided it doesn’t need to take the whole plan to the 13-member panel for a vote, but the PEP does hold the purse strings.
As part of the reform, the DOE wants to change how funding is allocated to special education students.
The DOE wants to allot funding for each special education student per capita as opposed to by class, which is what’s done now. This supports the idea of integrating them into the school as much as possible instead.
However, the side effect of this, Fedkowskyj says, could be less funding.
Currently, when a school has a group of special education students that’s not large enough to fill out an entire class, the DOE will fund the group as if it were a full class, covering the needed costs for space and the teacher.
That would no longer happen, Fedkowskyj said, leaving principals to deal with a possible budget crunch.
There will be some transitional funding baked in for the first year, but after that, Fedkowskyj worries principals could flounder on their own.
“If you’re going to make a commitment of transition funding, you’ve got to make it more than one year,” he said.
Overall, the speed of the rollout has caused questions from parents and the Citywide Council on Special Education.
At a townhall meeting Tuesday, Chancellor Walcott fielded question after question from parents unsure how the reform would affect them.
Many worried their schools would be forced to take special education students, bumping their own children out of classrooms.
Walcott said there is no mandate to take special education students and they will not take seats away from general education, but they must now be evaluated for admission like any other student.
On May 11, Citywide Council on Special Education sent a letter to PEP members laying out a laundrylist of very specific questions about the reform.
Among other concerns, they wanted to know just how funding would be affected, if general education teachers will get new training to accommodate new students, and how the DOE plans to implement all these changes by next school year.
Fedkowskyj said all of these questions need to come up now or they will create a bumpy road in September, when the reform goes into affect.
He has been frustrated by a lack of communication from the DOE in the past, and he’s again worried about the short amount of preparation time.
“The timing on everything is off. It’s unfortunate,” Fedkowskyj said. “Parents have more questions than answers, which I’m afraid will only lead to greater confusion in September.”
The PEP will vote on the funding changes at its May 23 meeting.
By Jeremiah Dobruck
