Special-Ed Tuition a Growing Drain on D.C.

The absence of contracts and rate-setting has contributed to the overruns in the tuition budget that have left school officials scrambling to pull tens of millions of dollars annually from other programs.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the city's financial office provided documents for $41 million in transfers that occurred in 2003 and 2004. The records show that most of that money came from a general account that pays for supplies, equipment and maintenance at individual schools. About $2.1 million was taken from Ballou, for example.

"They were so overbudget that they took it from whatever budget was available," said school board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz, who, like other board members, said she had been unaware of the transfers. "It's the biggest scam in America."

For most of the $173 million shifted over the past five years, no records show where the funds came from.

The school system's chief financial officer, John Musso, who works for D.C. finance chief Natwar M. Gandhi, said that because the tuition payments were being made under court supervision, the financial office had to use whatever money it could find at the end of the fiscal year to pay the bills. Generating records would have resulted in delays, he added.

Musso said the office has compiled more accurate tuition spending figures this year because of better policies and training, which should alleviate the annual problem of severe underbudgeting.

Students Still Waiting

Meanwhile, the backlog of public school students waiting for special education services keeps growing. As of March, 2,521 students were awaiting services ordered by hearing officers, compared with 300 five years ago, according to figures that school officials provided to the judge overseeing one of the class-action lawsuits.

In December, after years of failing to meet the court's standards for delivery of services, the city signed a consent decree in which it agreed to spend $7.3 million above the school budget to hire 70 additional psychologists, social workers and therapists. School officials said they hope most of the employees will be hired by this summer.

Janey said the school system is paying a national search firm $100,000 to try to fill other vacancies in the special education department. Part of the problem is salary, educators said. Top pay for a special education aide in the District is $18,300, compared with an average salary of $32,000 for a "para-educator" in Montgomery.

The larger issue, Janey and other school officials said, is that the D.C. school system is classifying too many children as disabled, especially in the early grades, rather than giving them the extra attention that would allow them to succeed without that designation. More than 18 percent of the city's public school students are in special education, compared with 11 percent in Prince George's, for example.

"Special education is a mask for the real fix that's needed with regular education," said Janey, who took over as superintendent in September 2004.

In a school system that is 84 percent black, blacks account for 90 percent of the special education population and 84 percent of the students sent to private schools.

In addition to a lack of resources, turnover among top administrators has kept the school system from solving the chronic problems, educators and lawyers say. The system has had five superintendents in the past decade. New leaders launch initiatives to reform special education, then quit before seeing them through.

The most recent head of special education, Ray Bryant, left in March 2005 and has not been replaced. Janey said he has yet to find the right candidate.

"Nobody can stay in that job more than a couple of years because of the whole crisis mode of the thing," said Main, the Lafayette Elementary principal, who worked under Bryant's predecessor. So many parts of the special education system are broken, she said, that "everything is a top priority" and any issue left unaddressed -- personnel vacancies, missing information, program shortages -- erupts into a crisis demanding immediate attention.

"There's very little time to be proactive, [to do] future planning," she said.

Cafritz and other school officials said the District may have no choice but to make a much larger investment in public programs while still paying the private tuition -- financing both special education systems long enough for the reforms in the public system to take root.

"We can get to the point where we can spend a normal amount [on special education], but we need to have a normal school system first," Cafritz said.