BOARDWATCH: Remarks by David R. Stone
[ Editor's Note. The following is the "Statement to Chicago Board of Education, 7/27/2016" by David R. Stone, teacher of diverse learners, Gallistel Language Academy. David Stone provided the Board and public with his contact information, so we are including it here, too: drstone1@cps.edu / drstone@ ameritech.net, 774-480-3000. George N. Schmidt, Editor, Substance].
Diverse Learners Deserve Full Funding
At the Chicago Board of Education meeting on Wednesday, July 27, 2016, Chief Executive Officer Forrest Claypool announces a new plan to overcome diverse learners' "achievement gap." ("Diverse learners" is the term Chicago Public Schools introduced about a year ago to replace the term "special education students.") The new plan is called Multi Tier Support System (MTSS). It offers various "tiers" from simple accommodations by the classroom teacher all the way to the highest tier where students get an Individual Education Plan (IEP) plus support from an aide or a Special Education teacher. Claypool also announced that this year (for the first time) Special Education funds are included in each school's budget at the beginning of the school year. He promised that even with MTSS and "student based budgeting" at each school, all IEPs will be fully funded. Substance photo by David R. Stone.
Hello. I am David Stone, and I teach at Gallistel Language Academy. I have been a teacher of students with special needs (known as "diverse learners") for 15 years. I am proud that we have honored our commitment to provide all students an appropriate education in the least restrictive environment – but I fear that our new budget fails to honor that commitment. The Board of Education now seems more interested in good public relations than in good public education.
Diverse learners have a right to special services. This is mandated in federal law and supported by years of court cases. The Board receives federal funding specifically to support special education. Yet the Board’s new school-by-school budgets, and the new MTSS funding for all, lump these special education funds in with each school's total budget for ALL students. This hides substantial cuts to the school budgets, and threatens to deny students the special services they need.
This “Student Based Budgeting” seems to be an attempt to put the blame on principals when services are cut. Yet, ultimately, the Board is responsible for ensuring that the funds it receives are spent properly. Without funds dedicated to special education, the Board appears to violate federal law, and risks a lawsuit it will lose.
Any cuts to classroom education are harmful, and cuts to special education are especially egregious. The Board should instead cut its bloated and growing bureaucracy, and reverse years of cuts in funding for neighborhood schools. Money is available. For example, let’s call for the return of money that is now being diverted to bankers and real estate developers through toxic interest rate swaps and TIFs (Tax Increment Financing property tax zones). Please join the Chicago Teachers Union and others in asking the mayor and City Council to tap such sources of revenue. Making the rich pay their fair share could provide hundreds of millions in additional funding, so diverse learners – and ALL learners – will get the education they deserve.
Author’s note: During the public participation portion of the Board of Education’s monthly meetings, sometimes CPS executives and members of the Board responded immediately, before calling the next speaker. After some speakers (including me) questioned the way special education is being funded this year, CEO Forrest Claypool declared, “Every IEP [Individual Education Plan] gets funded.” He claimed that 4 percent of the funds are being held back to provide services as IEPs are adjusted later in the year. He denied one speaker’s concern that the 4 percent was set aside to cover legal fees in case parents of students with special needs file lawsuits. Board member Dr. Mahalia Hines added that each IEP is a legal document and will be fully funded.
These comments actually reinforce some of the points we made in our speeches:
• Last year, IEPs were fully funded by additional money that the Board had dedicated to special education. This year, those funds have already been allocated to the schools before any IEPs are funded. The only way for all IEPs to be fully funded is to make cuts from other parts of the school budget.
• Moving the special education funds into the individual school budgets artificially inflated the size of this year’s budgets, so the total each school is receiving in 2016-17 almost matches last year’s totals. This allowed the Board to hide the truth that less money is available for regular education this year.
• Principals and Local School Councils will need to decide how to allocate their limited funds, so the fight over what gets funded and what gets cut will happen at the local level. The Board can thus claim (as it has) that it isn’t taking funds away from the classroom, because it now is the principals who are making the cuts.
• IEPs are not all written at the beginning of the school year. At any time during the school year, a student may be identified as needing special services. With nearly all the funds committed at the beginning of the school year, any new IEPs after September are likely to force the school to make even more budget cuts later in the school year.
• With budgets so tight, there is a financial incentive to limit the amount of special services provided to diverse learners. If students are denied some of the services they need, lawsuits are possible. At least some of the 4% “holdback” is likely to be spent on legal fees.
I believe the Board members were telling the truth when they said that all IEPs will be fully funded. So what will happen?
(a) Some IEPs will be limited, giving students less than the full range of services they need.
(b) There will be other budget cuts that affect classrooms. (c) Both.
There is one way to change the answer to (d) None of the above. The answer, as many speakers told the Board, is to get new revenue for our schools.
By: Susan Zupan
CPS "compensation" for lost IEP minutes/services?
Has anyone else heard of summer school and/or after-school programing being utilized within CPS as "compensation" to sped students for IEP services not having been or met throughout a school year?
If this is indeed happening or has happened, wouldn’t the result be cost savings that could result in less incentive for principals budgeting from that type of mindset to hire full-time sped teachers or worry about the loss of IEP sped services?
Since we still operate from a (continually and miserably failing) business model of public education, a basic question from the above mindset would be: What is the bottom-line financial cost of a summer school class(es) and/or after-school program(s) versus the bottom-line cost of a full-time sped teacher(s) for an entire school year, that is, IF the above "compensation" has somehow been deemed acceptable for identified IEP violations?
Regardless, everything we are and have been so negatively experiencing re school budgets in recent years is a direct result of the mindset demanded for the Orwellian 1984 opposite-speak of "student-based" (gen ed) and now "all means all" (sped) manner of budgeting instituted under the mayoral control of Rahm. Rahm’s divide-and-conquer, here’s-your-local-school-shovel budgeting eliminated the Chicago Board of Education’s responsibility to pay the cost of teachers (from newbies to veterans with doctorates) for teaching positions allocated to schools via established formulas re the number of students in those schools. Financially, that was as it should be.