TAC Students Due Compensatory Services

By ANDREA EGER

Read the state’s compliance audit of special education at Tulsa alternative schools.

TPS is told it violated requirements in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Tulsa Public Schools is facing the potentially expensive prospect of compensating special education students who did not receive services they were entitled to at the troubled Tulsa Academic Center.

The state Department of Education recently notified TPS that it had violated a host of requirements in the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

“We are required to assure compliance with this federal law in order for all Oklahoma school districts to receive federal special education funds,” said Misty Kimbrough, assistant state superintendent for special education services.

The Tulsa district now has a series of deadlines to meet over the next two months to respond to the state’s findings and to develop plans for improving services, documentation and discipline procedures for all special education students.

Kimbrough has said that the compliance review at TAC was triggered by student, parent or employee complaints to the state and media reports.

In mid-March the Tulsa World began a series of stories documenting teacher, parent and student accounts of overcrowding and frequent violence at the alternative school, which was founded in August 2007 by Superintendent Michael Zolkoski.

Through personal observation, records checks and interviews with parents and school staff in May, state officials found that:

Special education students weren’t provided specially designed classes or services at TAC.

There were no special education policies and procedures for TAC personnel until April.

Special education students who were suspended from TAC received no education services during their time away from school.

Many students were placed at TAC before it was determined whether their discipline problem was related to their disability.

Decisions about placing special education students at TAC and two other alternative schools — Franklin Youth Academy and Project 12 – - did not include the student’s team of teachers, counselors and parents.

TPS now has to send the state an accounting of every special education student who was placed at TAC in 2007-08 — district officials say there were 322 — and convene meetings to discuss what “compensatory services” each child may need to make up for lost services or credits.

Taylor Young, assistant superintendent of special education at TPS, said the district will have to pay for compensatory services for as many students as necessary, but “it’s not an absolute” that every student will need compensation.

“We have to determine the degree to which (education) service was provided and the degree to which the student would require compensatory services. One child may have been at TAC 20 days and one may have been there 100 days,” he said. “We do not want a one- size-fits-all answer.”

Compensatory services could include home instruction, special tutoring, credit recovery programs, computer programs and summer school.

The financial costs won’t be known until officials find out “how many parents will take us up on the need for those services,” Young said.

The state officials’ findings were not a total surprise to TPS because the Tulsa school board’s own attorneys revealed in June many of the infractions in their own investigation of failings at the Tulsa Academic Center.

The attorneys concluded that the response from personnel throughout Tulsa Public Schools last school year was “completely inadequate.”

As a result, attorney Andrea Kunkel, with the law firm Rosenstein, Fist and Ringold, helped TPS administrators develop new procedures for the review of all student referrals to alternative schools and to ensure that special education needs are considered.

Young said those procedures “absolutely will give us all of the oversight required to ensure there will never again be a situation like the one that occurred in the last year.”

A district review committee has been formed to check school administrators’ referrals of students to alternative schools. Also, district-level special education coordinators have been given authority to overrule both the school administrators’ and the district review committee’s referrals.

After the school board released its attorneys’ investigation, Kayla Bower, a top disability rights advocate in Oklahoma, filed a formal complaint with the state Department of Education on behalf of all special education students who attended TAC in 2007-08.

Bower, an attorney, is executive director at the Oklahoma Disability Law Center in Oklahoma City, which is a federally funded protection and advocacy agency and an affiliate of the National Disability Rights Network.

She said she had not yet seen the state’s findings about TAC, but she remains concerned about special education students who were in state custody or under court jurisdiction “who might be forgotten.”

“Compensatory education is whatever it takes to make up for what you lost and some of those students at TAC missed out on their whole year of school, essentially,” Bower said. “The sad thing is a lot of these kids were already behind. Of all the people who could not afford a year out of their life, these were those children.”

Status update on Tulsa Academic Center

As of Friday, there were 40 students enrolled at Tulsa Academic Center, including four special education students. No more than 120 students will be allowed to be enrolled there at any given time this school year, oLcials have said.

A faculty and staN roster for the school indicates that student- teacher ratios also will be kept much lower this year. Currently, 13 teachers and four special education teachers are on the faculty, and three additional teaching positions are still vacant. Three counselors have also been assigned at TAC.

The TAC support staN has also been bolstered. It includes seven leadership instructors, seven teacher assistants and three paraprofessionals who help with special education students.

Andrea Eger 581-8470

andrea.eger@tulsaworld.com

Originally published by ANDREA EGER World Staff Writer.

(c) 2008 Tulsa World. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.