Photo from Options Public Charter School

A troubled DC charter school for kids with special needs will stay open for one more year under the management of a court-appointed receiver. But a private DC-area school with experience in special education could have taken over the school if it had been contacted earlier, according to an official at the school.

The Public Charter School Board (PCSB) voted yesterday to allow Options PCS, which had been threatened with closure after DC sued its former managers for self-dealing, to remain open through the end of the next school year. A court-appointed receiver, Josh Kern, will continue to oversee Options and plans to hire an executive director to manage day-to-day operations.

Kern founded and served as the leader of a high-performing charter school, Thurgood Marshall Academy, but he has never managed a special education program before.

When asked if the PCSB had approached any private schools about operating Options, PCSB official Tami Lewis said that the agency’s staff had “made considerable effort” to do that, but that several schools had “indicated they were not ready to take on so quickly the responsibility of managing a whole school.”

But an official with the local private school, where many DC public schools place special needs students they cannot serve adequately, contends that the school could have operated Options next year if the PCSB had raised the possibility earlier. The official says the PCSB approached the school only recently.

Lisa Ott, executive director of DCASE, an organization that represents several private special education schools, said her group was approached on February 10, and that it would have had to submit a charter application by PCSB’s deadline of March 3. “We stand ready to assist in the transition and in the long term solution,” Ott said. “If they had reached out to us earlier in the process, we could be doing that right now.”

In January the PCSB approached DCPS about operating Options, which serves a low-income student body with severe special needs. But those talks recently fell apart, and DCPS says its neighborhood schools lack the ability to serve Options students.

PCSB Executive Director Scott Pearson told the DC Council in January that the PCSB was trying to determine the future of Options by working with OSSE, DCPS, other charter schools, and a charter special education cooperative. He made no mention of private special education schools.

Private placement

Another possibility for Options students would have been to place them with private schools that cater to students with special needs.

That suggestion came up at a DC Council hearing in January. Councilmembers Tommy Wells and David Catania pressed PCSB officials on the need to consider private placements for Options students whose special needs cannot be accommodated at the school.

“We may just have to get the money from the PCSB budget to pay for these private placements,” Catania told PCSB officials.

Under federal law, public schools that cannot fully accommodate the needs of a student with medical or learning disabilities are required to enroll the student in a private school. Public schools typically negotiate tuition rates with private schools, but the rates commonly exceed what the DC government spends on such students, about $29,000 per year.

During the last school year about 1,000 DC students were placed in private special education schools, or about 9% of all students with special needs in both traditional public schools and charters.

One of Mayor Vincent Gray’s goals has been to cut the number of the private placements in half. At a DC Council hearing on special education last year, several parents and advocates questioned how the city was achieving this goal. City officials claim they are expanding special education capacity in public schools.

The possibility of private placements for Options students has not been discussed in public charter board meetings and court hearings, according to the Washington Post.

While Gray has spoken of how much money DC has saved through reducing private placements, Tami Lewis of the PCSB said that cost was not an issue in determining how to handle the Options situation. Lewis told the Post that the quality of private schools serving students with disabilities is uneven.

“I think there’s almost this fantasy that if we put these children in non-publics, it would be a magic pill,” Lewis told the Post. “That is not the case.”

In response, Ott, from the non-public advocacy group DCASE, told me, “There are a number of non-publics that serve this very population and serve them well, students with these very disabilities.”

Few private placements at Options

At Options, the rate of private placement for students needing special education was only about 1% last year (two out of 241 eligible students), far lower than the District average of 9%. (Figures appear on p. 1097 of the linked document.)

In their 2011-2012 annual report, Options told its board that it had received a financial award from OSSE in recognition of its low private placement rate.

Generally, parents hire lawyers to secure private placements for their children. But the low-income families at Options may not be able to afford to do that.

Linda Tompkins, a former Options PTA board member, said that most Options students do not have parents who can advocate for their needs and rights. Most are raised by grandparents, aunts and uncles, foster parents, or a single parent with no time to learn about federal special education law.

Under that law, public schools, including charters, must inform a student’s parents or caregivers of their right to private placement during an annual review of the student’s Individual Education Plans (IEP).

But earlier this year OSSE found that Options had failed to review the IEPs of more than 100 of its 241 special education students for over 3 years, according to an education official familiar with the situation. As a result, the school would not have informed the parents or caregivers of their rights to a private placement.

One disadvantage of keeping Options open only one year longer is that it makes it hard to hire and retain teachers. In January Kern complained at a DC Council hearing of an exodus of teachers. Now that it’s clear the school will close at the end of the next school year, it will be difficult to hire experienced replacements.