School officials outlined a plan to change the way city schools serve students with disabilities at a closed-door meeting this morning with special education advocates.
The plan’s first step: Telling schools they have to accept, and “embrace,” students with special needs.
“For too long, educating students with disabilities has meant separating them from their general education peers,” Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said in a statement. “Today we are building on the premise that every school must be able to educate the vast majority of these children.”
That premise represents a badly needed advance for the city schools, according to special education advocates.
“The principles in [the plan] are wonderful, but they’ve been law forever,” said Maggie Moroff, who coordinates the ARISE Coalition but was not speaking on the coalition’s behalf. “The overarching goals are exactly what they ought to be, it’s just that in my mind they’re not so novel.”
In a statement, Laura Rodriguez, the department’s first deputy chancellor in charge of special education, explained that under the plan, schools will get more flexibility to design new programs for students with special needs; will collaborate more with parents; and receive a toolkit to help them improve instruction. They’ll also be held accountable for meeting students’ special education needs, she said.
How any of this will happen is not yet clear. A PowerPoint presentation given this morning offers few details, and Klein and Rodriguez did not offer more, Moroff said.
In the first phase of the plan this fall, about 200 schools will get specialized special education teacher training through 10 Children First Networks, the new unit of organization for how schools get administrative and instructional support. Those schools and networks have not yet been announced. The department told advocates this morning that it has the funds to carry out the plan.
Moroff said she was surprised by the vagueness of the plan revealed this morning, which comes more than six months after Rodriguez was appointed to lead special education reforms. “I sort of thought they were going to have something more fleshed out,” she said.
According to Moroff, the plan hews closely to the recommendations delivered by former DOE executive Garth Harries, who conducted a controversial study of the special education system during his final year at the department. When Harries released his report in July, special education advocates said they were heartened but would reserve judgement until the department announced implementation details.