As you probably already know, AIMS got a reprieve yesterday that will at least keep the schools operating during the summer session while the controversial board fights OUSD’s decision to yank its charter. Jim Mordecai, who many followers know from OUSD board of education meetings, noted:

The FCMAT audit found problems with the summer program called SAIL. SAIL was a private summer school offered by Dr. Chavis’ company and a conflict of interest according to the audit report. For new students it was mandatory and thus violation of the California Constitution. Instructors were not paid a salary but paid with scholarships.

Will the SAIL program be part of the summer school? Is there a new summer school or has there been both public and private summer school in the past?

Good questions. Here are the answers from AIMS staff.

1. SAIL program is not being offered this year during the summer session. Instructors who work during the summer session are being paid at their regular pay rate.

2. In the past, there has/have been both public and private summer school. 

The Alameda County Board of Education is set to decide whether to uphold the revocation on June 25. That should be a lively meeting.

I was planning to attend the Programs for Exceptional Children Community Advisory Committee meeting tonight after writing about the departure of OUSD’s special education director Karen Mates. I can’t make it but there is a lot to talk about from what I hear:

The Special Education Teacher Caucus will be presenting, there will be
discussion about plans for next year’s Special Education program, and there
will be legal advocates on-hand to help staff the break-out consultation
groups (below). The meeting is from 6-9pm
tonight, potluck at 6. Location is United for Success Academy, 2101 35th Ave., and there will be
childcare and Spanish language translation.

1: Setting Strong Goals and Ensuring Academic Progress in the General
Education Classroom
Estableciendo metas fuertes y asegurando el progreso académico de los
estudiantes en los salones de educacion general

2: Setting Strong Goals and Ensuring Academic Progress in the Special Day
Classroom
Estableciendo metas fuertes y asegurando el progreso académico de los
estudiantes en los salones de día especial

3: Behavior Plans & Behavior Support
Planes para el apoyar el comportamiento y apoyo al comportamiento en general

4: School-Site Concerns—Beyond Special Education Staff
Preocupaciones relacionadas a la escuela—Mas allá de los empleados para la
educación especial

5: Ensuring the Effective Use of Accommodations & Modifications
Asegurando el uso eficaz de los acomodos y las modificaciones

6: Making the Transition to Middle School
Haciendo la transición a la secundaria

7: Making the Transition to High School and to Adulthood
Haciendo la transición a la preparatoria y a la adultez

8: Supporting Special Education Staff (*Intended as a support session for
staff who need their own consultation)
Apoyando a los empleados de educación especial

9: When Everything Goes Wrong: Hitting Up Against the Wall
Cuando todo no funciona y chocamos contra la pared

Many thanks to Stacey Smith for the reminder.

Steven Weinberg, a retired Oakland teacher and occasional blog contributor, writes about a cut to a program that supports hundreds of new teachers each year.

Since my retirement I have stayed involved with the district by providing coaching and mentoring to new teachers as part of the district’s Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) program. Last week those of us who provide that help were told that the program will suffer a huge budget reduction for the coming year, with only about 70 new teachers receiving mentoring support instead of the 320 receiving that help today. Since each coach receives a $1,300 stipend for each teacher supported, this reduction will save the district about $400,000 next year.

The coaches in the BTSA program meet once a week with each new teacher. The coach observes the new teacher in the classroom several times during the year. Together the coach and new teacher discuss lesson planning, classroom control, the needs of English language learners and special needs students and methods to assess student progress and evaluate the effectiveness of instruction. Together they review and evaluate student work. The new teacher reflects upon how various approaches are working and learns to continually revise his or her practice to become more effective.

As part of the process, the new teacher also completes and turns in to the New Teacher Talent Development Office a series of forms and reflections demonstrating his or her growth over the two years that he or she is involved with the BTSA program. These forms and reflections form the basis for the Talent Development Office certifying that they have completed “induction,” a state requirement for converting a preliminary credential (which lasts only 5 years) to a clear credential.

New Oakland teachers would still have to complete all the forms and reflections, but most of them would not receive the coaching that is now provided. Coaches were told that the Talent Development Office was hoping that subject area specialists and consultants working from the central office, along with school administrators, would assist the teachers without coaches. It appears, however, that those individuals haven’t actually been consulted about this increase in their responsibilities and workloads.

No one presenting this new plan could say who decided that the budget should be cut in this way, or why budget cuts were required in a year when funding for the district should be increasing.

These cuts seem extremely misguided. Oakland’s current mentoring program is highly regarded, particularly the way it uses coaches. It seems wrong to cut back a program where OUSD is actually doing a better job than most districts in the state. It is also important to note that many of the teachers who will no longer have mentors are special education teachers. A huge percentage of these teachers in Oakland do not have clear credentials. It would be unconscionable to leave these teachers, who work with our most vulnerable students, without support.

I asked the new teacher I am working with this year how the changes would affect her when she does her second year of induction next year. She said that completing the forms and submitting them to the office would be pretty much a waste of time because she would just be writing down what she already knows, as opposed to this year when our conferences led her to rethink some of her assumptions and consider things is a new way and to grow as a teacher. She also said that she particularly appreciated having me observe her, as I was the only person to observe her for an entire lesson in the two years she has been teaching.

Forcing principals to take additional responsibilities for new teacher induction also seems unwise. Research stresses the importance of teachers having mentors who are not involved in their evaluation. This allows for the kind of trust and openness that is crucial for growth. Principals cannot fulfill the role of an evaluator and a coach successfully. In addition, there is an equity issue. New teachers are over- represented at flatland schools where principals already have their hands full with challenges. Asking those principals to take on a larger workload is ridiculous.

Hopefully, as these cuts become more widely known, saner heads will prevail, and the funds will be restored.

June is going to be a busy month.

June 3 is the next special ed Community Advisory Committee meeting. 

The Alameda County BOE has until 7/17 to decide on the AIMS charter (whether to uphold OUSD’s decision to revoke the charter). They have meetings during which that can happen: 6/11 and 6/25.

May 29 OUSD BOE selects District 4 candidates to interview to replace Gary Yee. 

June 5 they will identify final candidates

June 12 is the deadline for making their appointment. Unless they heed the public attempt to open up the process, the new D4 representative will be announced at the regular board meeting. 

At the same June 12 the board will have the first reading of the OUSD budget (more about dates here). 

June 26 is the final reading. 

A letter from the Block by Block Organizing Network to OUSD Board of Education chairman David Kakishiba asking for a little more public access to the appointment process that will fill Gary Yee’s District 4 seat. The board is planning to appoint a replacement by June 12 and already closed the applications last week. Here is a list of the candidates with one change: Carlos Carmona sent me an email this weekend explaining that he was disqualified due to his “residency.”  Here is the letter:

Dear Mr. Kakishiba,

We are writing as Oakland citizens to ask you to assure that the process of filling the District 4 opening on the Board is transparent and allows for input from concerned members of the community. We appreciate that the Board wisely decided not to hold a costly election to fill a year-and-a-half vacancy. However, we believe that six people alone should not decide whom to choose without input from the electorate. We hope that you assure that the criteria for your selection are clear and that the public has opportunity to express concerns and opinions.

It is our recommendation that the Board hold at least one special meeting (a town hall, if you will) where a panel of representatives of the public have a chance to ask questions of all the candidates. Given your timeline, we hope that that meeting will be held on an evening (or weekend day) between May 29 and June 12 – the sooner the better, of course.

The people deserve to have a voice in the process of selecting someone to fill a seat that is normally an elected position.

Yours truly,

Evans Daniels

Sharon Rose

Sheryl Walton

Co-chairs, Block by Block Organizing Network

Guest blogger Stacey Smith is an OUSD parent and volunteer who has served on several district committees, including the Community Advisory Committee for Special Education. What she writes about does not reflect the view of any group.

The Oakland Unified School District’s 2011-2016 Strategic Plan calls for “a significant decrease in the number of special education litigious and non-compliant cases” by 2015-2016, a legal problem the district blames on negative relationships and communications with parents and the community.

Unfortunately, data so far shows that non-complaint cases and litigation have remained the same or increased, attorneys’ fees are up about 50 percent, and the real problem may be program implementation and lack of critical student support.

Let me explain:

OUSD has long complained about the high cost of special education litigation and compliance complaints, claiming these costs create a barrier to providing better special education. The goal it developed is hard to measure when there are no specific numbers, dollar figures or percentages included as part of the goal — or even a description of how OUSD defines “litigious cases.”

But it’s budget time again. It seems like a good time to talk about how OUSD is progressing toward this vague goal and how that could affect spending decisions for 2013-14. This isn’t just an exercise in data crunching – there is a real child with special needs behind each case.

I’ve heard of a few high-cost civil cases over the years, and I wasn’t able to collect that data for this exercise. But if we’re going to talk about large numbers of cases that could generate high expense to the district and be targets for reduction, we should look at the two most common types of cases in special education: compliance complaints and due process filings.

In general, a compliance complaint is used when the district hasn’t fulfilled its commitment to the student or when it hasn’t followed specific special education laws or procedures. For example: not providing a translator for an IEP meeting, or not providing an aide or services the IEP says a student is supposed to have. Due process is for things like a disagreement about what goes into the Individual Education Plan, or IEP, or where the student will be placed. (There’s overlap between the two legal options and it’s confusing to everyone, so just know that from here on in if I refer to “compliance” I’m talking about compliance complaint data.)

OUSD’s strategic plan suggests that special education compliance complaints and litigation are directly linked to a lack of positive relationships and communications (Strategic Plan Focus 2C.6). Improve relationships, decrease complaints, decrease costs—so goes the district’s theory. CDE was unable to provide data on why due process cases were filed, but I received all the alleged compliance violations listed for the compliance complaints. Wonder if OUSD’s theory holds up?

Not really, according to data provided by the California Department of Education. The number one reason OUSD has been found out of compliance since 2008 has been the district’s failure to implement a student’s IEP. Last year this violation was cited in half the non-complaint cases.

This isn’t about relationships.

In fact all of the different compliance violations the California Department of Education found would have had a negative impact on the student’s special education supports or the creation of a meaningful IEP. The data suggests an ongoing failure by the district to provide the resources needed to help these students – repeatedly and over a long period of time.

OUSD says that the figures it used to develop the plan were 17 compliance cases and 20 litigation cases. OUSD hasn’t provided specifics on the figure it used for non-compliant cases, despite repeated requests. The numbers the district provides are perplexing because the strategic plan was initiated in 2009-10 and designed in 2010-11, but OUSD’s numbers don’t match the data from the Department of Education.

However, compliance complaints and due process filings seem to have since increased beyond those figures, especially if  due process filings and civil cases are included. It’s hard to predict what will happen during the remainder of this school year and beyond but right now it looks like OUSD isn’t on track to meet its goal.

Let’s talk money. Noncompliance has real costs, not only in terms of support not provided to students who need it, but also in terms of expense to the district.

If the Department of Education finds OUSD is out of compliance, it orders the district to fix the situation within a certain amount of time. Sometimes the department orders compensatory education or monetary reimbursement to families. For example, a family might pay for services the district failed to provide and then seek to reclaim that money. Compensatory education can also be a big expense, especially if it is provided by an outside agency. It doesn’t happen all the time; some Department of Education findings seem to just tell OUSD to start following the law and sometimes the district will correct the problem before the department orders action.

Due process is harder to quantify because the parties often settle before a hearing. Maybe the Office of Administrative Hearings could provide some clarification, but OUSD often imposes a gag order on families for both due process and compliance complaint resolutions so it doesn’t seem to want that information to get out. I was able to identify one due process hearing decision between 2010 and October 2012 with an expense to OUSD. The district was ordered to provide 255 hours of compensatory education to a student through a nonpublic agency with no other reimbursement costs. It seems fair to assume that there would be other OUSD expense as part of these confidential resolutions, too.

In addition, from 2009-2012, OUSD spent a half million dollars on attorneys’ fees. Over half of that sum covered families’ attorney fees. Unfortunately, OUSD did not separate out the different types of litigation in the spreadsheet they provided, so we know the expense but not how it was incurred. We also know the current 2012-13 special education budget allocates $350,000 for legal fees and $383,277 for “Payment to Family in Lieu Of” but not the basis for these budget figures. It’s like piecing together a puzzle, isn’t it?

The district has not answered my requests to produce a complete estimate of the cost of complaints and litigation, which would include OUSD personnel costs, the contractor fees for things like compensatory education, training and materials, and reimbursement outlays. If they are not tracking these items closely, they should be. These are the true costs that are hurting the program. Based only on the data available, the implied expense is staggering both in terms of time and money.

It also seems that legal costs are not the cause of failure to provide service, as the district so often claims, but rather they are the consequence of that failure. There will always be a few disgruntled people, but noncompliance seems too widespread to blame OUSD’s legal woes solely on poor communication or relationships.

An analysis of the data and information from OUSD staff show a systemic failure by the district to meet its obligations, repeatedly and often avoidably. Sometimes, even intentionally. One former special education director told me her policy was to never go to due process. She would let an issue go until the last possible minute and then resolve it before a formal hearing. It was a bet that most families would fold before making it that far, even when the district was at fault. It worked, but how much did that strategy cost the district during her tenure? How much did it cost the students? Is the strategy still used today?

When OUSD doesn’t fulfill its obligations, it reduces a student’s chance to be successful. That is the ultimate cost, which causes a ripple effect in the classroom, the school community and beyond. OUSD has had five special education directors in the last seven years and the position is open yet again. All of these folks have tried to address the situation to some extent, along with some extraordinary staff who struggle on through the ongoing lack of stability and uncertainty. But until program and budget decisions stop being imposed on the department, as they have for years with no regard for actual need, and until OUSD has the will to tackle the issue of support for these students district-wide, I’m afraid we’ll continue to see both the problems and the expense imposed by these conditions.

What do you think?

For those of you who fought for more school funding and are resting easy after the passage of Prop 30: You might be planning a backyard barbecue or some spring cleaning this weekend but not the annual Ride for a Reason bike to Sacramento, whose organizers would like to remind you that it’s not over ’til it’s over. The group takes off from Oakland Saturday at sunrise to advocate for additional state funding and to raise money for enrichment programs in four North Oakland schools: Claremont Middle, Oakland Technical High, Emerson Elementary, and Oakland International High.

More money? Yes, say the riders, in order for California to get to the national average in state funding per student. California would need three times the revenue expected under Prop 30  to reach the national average, according to the California Budget Project. Ride for a Reason didn’t mention Gov. Jerry Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula.

CBP just  released its analysis of the proposal, which changes the way school districts are funded by giving districts with low-income and ESL K-12 pupils extra money.

Our regional education reporter Theresa Harrington wrote about it here in February and will have an update story soon. It’s too early to apply specifics to OUSD because state lawmakers are still dueling, armed with separate bills. My take is that they fear even the hint of losing money for their district (which is not what the local formula does) or letting another district get a cent more then theirs.

Brown’s proposal is weak on oversight and accountability for local school boards who would be in charge of spending the  extra money on the low-income and English learning students based on “what makes most sense” based on local needs, Steven Bliss of the CBP said during a call-in this morning. His organization favors the proposal but conceded there are “issues and problems with the accountability piece.” The he local school board comes up with an accountability plan spelling out how the money would be used to address specific issues. The plan gets vetted before board members vote to adopt along with the district budget. The budget and local funding formula align are supposed to align. In the case of OUSD, the Alameda County Board of Education would decide whether they do. But the governor’s proposal does not specific what to do if they do not align and doesn’t go far enough to make sure local school boards are doing a good job prioritizing and spending.

The second catch is the money. Where is the additional $15 million going to come from? Theresa’s story will explain the short-term answer. But as far as the long term answer, the proposal depends on economic growth. The Ride for a Reason cyclists might be pedaling to Sacramento for a few more years before the plan is fully funded.

As for Saturday: Most riders will depart Oakland near sunrise and arrive in Sacramento in the afternoon for a 4:30 p.m. rally on the north steps of the Capitol building. State Superintendent of Education, Tom Torlakson, is the featured speaker.

The original flyer.

The City of Oakland Youth Commission, the City’s Neighborhood Services Department, Assemblymember Nancy Skinner, Strategic Policy Partnerships, and  Councilmember Lynette McElhaney will facilitate the Youth Forum on Crime and Safety on Thursday, May 9, 2013 from 4:30-7:30pm. The forum will take place at Laney College at 900 Fallon Street in the Forum Lecture Hall (off 10^th Street). This forum is one of the six town hall meetings with the consultants of the Strategic Policy Partnerships which took place throughout the City this spring.

These town halls are intended to seek input from residents about the community’s public safety priorities as the Strategic Policy Partnership consultants develop a comprehensive crime reduction and suppression strategic plan.

Questions for these small groups will include:

• · What do you want to see the police do differently?
• · What can young people do to make Oakland safer?
• · If you were a police officer, what would you do to earn people’s respect and trust?

Parents of District 4 pupils, your OUSD representative (replacing Gary Yee) will be appointed by the current board by June 12. More details from the Tuesday meeting where trustees decided on all this are

I’Asha Warfield, a seventh grade teacher Frick Middle School, was honored today as a California nominee for the National Teacher of the Year Award.

Although not among the finalists or beating out Jeff Charbonneau, a Washington teacher who received the award, Warfield was the only California teacher nominated for the national award. The English teacher is one of five teachers who were recognized as Teacher of the Year for California.

Go here to see the article about Warfield.

Go here to see more about Charbonneau.