Special Ed System Exacts Price
In Waste, Neglect

A lost childhood ago, Willie Williamson was forgotten in the D.C. schools. He flunked kindergarten and first grade. His speech was a muddled slur. He never learned to read. He heard his father kill his brother with a shotgun in the next room. His life cried out for help.

Jeff Myers, head of the D.C. Special Education Division. (Post photo by James M. Thresher)

Willie was declared mildly retarded when he was 7, tested again at 10 and then never reevaluated for eight years. He was bumped up from grade to grade. Now 18, angry and illiterate, Willie hides in an overlarge jacket and watches the world with suspicion.

"He was lost in the system," said his guardian, Cynthia Savage. "Nobody cared enough to say, 'We will help this child.' "

Willie's experience is just one of the problems the schools' new chief executive and superintendent, Julius W. Becton Jr., will not be able to solve. The Southeast Washington youth is a product of a special education system in the D.C. public schools that gives millions of public dollars to lawyers and private schools but too often fails the children who need help most.

The division's budget is seriously skewed by failures of the public system, propelling increasing numbers of children into private schools at taxpayer expense.

Under federal law, the D.C. government must provide special education for eligible children. But if the public system cannot meet their needs, it must pay to send students to private schools that have the services.

Becton named a consultant from the management consulting firm of KPMG Peat Marwick in January to take over special education, a signal that he wants to fix the bureaucracy.

But Becton and Jeff Myers, 32, the third head of special education in seven months, will find intractable, systematic problems that exact a high cost, both in money and in the lives of children. "We're going to start from the bottom and build back up again," Becton said recently.

The special education system they face:

• Pays $21 million -- one-third of its budget -- to send 14 percent of its students to private schools.
• Pays nearly $2 million annually in fees to attorneys who sue the system on behalf of parents, spawning a mini-industry among lawyers who find the cases profitable and easy to win.
• Misses federally mandated deadlines so often that an estimated 1,000 children await evaluation and placement, a backlog that creates an opening for parents to sue.
• Misses the triennial testing for children already in special education so often that there is a backlog of as many as 2,000 youngsters awaiting those tests to check their progress.
• Leaves as many as half of the 7,648 students now identified as needing special education without the help prescribed for them, according to those who work in the system.

"There's a lot of gifted people in special education who don't get what they need to do a good job," said an outside observer, Nancy Opalack, who travels throughout the school system as a private advocate to get help for special education students. "Every Xerox is broken. There are no computers. No supplies. They work out of the trunks of their cars."

"It doesn't work very well," Myers said of the system in an interview shortly after he took the job. Next to his desk, above the Prospect Learning Center in Northeast Washington, a bucket caught a steady drip of water from the ceiling.

His division is responsible for providing remedial help to approximately one in 10 students in the District's public schools. They are spread among four special education schools, centers in eight schools and at least one special education classroom in almost every public school.

Some children, like Willie Williamson, get lost in that system. Others, like Benjamin Eby, get out.

Benjamin, from upper Northwest, is a bright student who has writing and behavior problems, according to records submitted in federal court. When the schools did not move quickly to help Benjamin at age 12, his parents got an attorney and put him in an exclusive private school in Vermont for a year and a half. The bill to the D.C. school system -- including tuition, air fare, hotels, a computer for Benjamin and ski lessons -- was more than $22,000 for one year, according to those records.

There are hundreds of cases such as Benjamin's in which parents have seized upon failures of the school system to place their children in private schools, with the bill sent to the public system. The lawyers they hire also are paid by the taxpayers.

There were 693 privately schooled special education students on the District's tuition rolls in 1995; this year there are 1,079.

Educators acknowledge that there always will be children with disabilities so unusual that they can best be helped by private schools with training specialties. But the District sent students to private residential schools at a rate five times the national average in 1994.

"You can pay $35,000 to put one child in a [private] school for a year. For that, you can hire a teacher and serve 10 kids," said Lynn Boyer, director of special education for Fairfax County, where few students are sent to private schools. The county has the region's largest school system.

Suing for placements is "a racket. I don't have any ambiguity about that," said Paul Chassy, former head of policy for the federal Office of Special Education and a critic of the District's system.

Counters Elizabeth Eby, Benjamin's mother: "I don't think it's a racket. I think it's unfortunate that only well-educated people get to use the system." If there is a racket, she says, "it's in the District of Columbia public school system, which has people whose jobs are dependent on checking boxes, repeating tests already done by other psychologists, preparing cases for hearings that then are lost because of time deadlines. . . . DCPS arguably has more jobs tied up in preparing these private school hearings than any private lawyer does."

Violating Federal Law

Federal law for 21 years has embraced a noble concept: All children have a right to a free public education, even if they have serious disabilities. That means students with disabilities -- anything from retardation to physical problems to dyslexia to emotional troubles -- must get "special" education and are entitled to it until they are 21.

The help may be as minimal as one hour of speech therapy a week sandwiched between regular classes or as comprehensive as a full boarding school for children too disabled to go to classes with others. The law sets strict requirements, with deadlines for testing students, providing the help they need and retesting.

Roberta Cooper persisted in getting son Derale into private school. At right is her fiance, Todd Estes.
(Post photo by Dayna Smith)

District schools routinely violate that law. Parents, teachers and advocates who work with the schools describe a chaotic system in which files are often incomplete, documents are missing, there is little communication, and children can get lost in the shuffle.

After Roberta Cooper moved into the Shaw-Howard University area in Northwest four years ago with her son, Derale, "I called them for weeks and weeks to get Derale assigned to a school," she said. "They finally called back and said he's been put in seventh grade at Terrell Junior High. I said: 'Go back to the drawing board. He's only 7 years old.'

"I don't think they actually looked at his records," Cooper said.

Recently, it was difficult to look at anyone's records. For six months, administrators had no access to computerized records of special education students because the main computer was locked in a closed building with no electricity or phone lines, Myers said.

The only recourse was a disorganized room of paper files, he said. By late January, when the computer was finally moved to another building, only the files of A through L had been put in order.

Myers said a chief goal is to introduce technology to keep better track of special education records, since the division's paperwork problems are costly.

If a parent or a teacher requests an evaluation, the school system has 50 days to test the child and devise an individual education plan.

But lawyers Charles Moran, Arthur Fawcett and Myrna Fawcett, who handle special education cases, analyzed 100 of their files for the D.C. financial control board last summer. They found that the average time for evaluation and placement was 156 days -- more than three times the legal limit.

The gap between the schools' required behavior and their performance is so wide that "there's no argument in 95 percent of these cases," Moran said. "We're litigating because there's no other way to force them to do what they are supposed to do."

The 50-day deadline, set by a federal court decision in 1972, has long been cited by D.C. school officials as a cause of their woes. It is the shortest in the nation; other school districts, including those in nearby Prince George's, Montgomery and Fairfax counties, typically allow 90 or 120 days before placement, and even at that, some of those counties face deadline problems. But in the years since the federal decision, the District has not adjusted to meet the shorter deadline, nor has it petitioned the court to extend the timetable.

Myers, however, said: "I don't have any problem with the time line. We are going to do our best to meet it."

The law also requires retesting every three years. But Gregg Corr, a federal official who conducted the last inspection of the city's special education system in 1993, said, "We found cases where children hadn't been reevaluated in eight, nine, 10 years." At public hearings this month, federal officials heard numerous parents say there has been no improvement since then.

Those officials say they offered D.C. school officials technical advice and consultation with specialists in other big cities who have solved similar problems, but they were puzzled by the lack of interest. "There was no follow-through," said Thomas Hehir, director of the federal Office of Special Education.

One Family's Frustrations

Martha and Paul Rubenstein, owners of a stationery store, said they wanted to keep their son Alex enrolled in public schools in Northwest Washington, where they live. But the Chevy Chase couple said they were frustrated when they tried to get help from Lafayette Elementary School when Alex began lagging in second grade.

After numerous requests to school officials, "they finally came up with their plan to do something . . . and did nothing," Paul Rubenstein said.

The school balked at sending Alex's homework assignment to his parents each day; teachers refused to fill out observation reports; an administrator blithely told them to put him on drugs, the Rubensteins complained. That response frustrated the family's long effort to understand the learning disability in which Alex soared in some skills and failed in others badly.

"They wanted us to please shut up and leave them alone," Martha Rubenstein said. "At one of the meetings, the lawyer for the schools said, 'Why don't you just move to Montgomery County?' "

Instead, the Rubensteins sued the system and eventually placed Alex in a private school in Silver Spring. Cost to the D.C. schools: about $13,600 a year in tutoring and tuition. Cost to the taxpayers for the Rubensteins' lawyer: $54,638.

"It's unfortunate that it has to be that way, that you have to pull out all the stops," Paul Rubenstein said.

The parents of Benjamin Eby took a similar route to court.

Charles and Elizabeth Eby made the necessary application in June 1992 to enroll Benjamin in a public special education program. But it was not until March -- nine months after the placement request and six months after the start of the school year -- that Benjamin was assigned to the District's Buchanan Secondary Learning Center.

By then, court records show, his parents had put him in the Greenwood School in Putney, Vt., with 41 students on 100 rural acres. The Ebys sued the D.C. school system to keep him there and to collect tuition -- at $2,571 a month -- plus other costs.

Their bill for one year included school inspection trips to New England for Benjamin's parents, five round-trip flights to and from Vermont on holidays and parent visitation weekends, Holiday Inn bills and $9,608 in attorneys' fees, according to court records. The District paid $22,554 but is balking over other charges, complaining in court about "expenditures such as ski rentals, a judo uniform, music tapes [and] trips to restaurants."

The bills, Mrs. Eby said, covered items that instructors said Benjamin needed -- "I didn't send them bills for everything" -- and the air fares are a consequence of going to school out of the area. "Taking an airplane is a little like taking a school bus if you go to school in Vermont," she said.

In the case of Benjamin, now 16 and in a private school in Maryland, taking the school system to court was the only option, his mother said. He started out in public school, but when it quickly became apparent his needs would not be met, she said, he was moved to one of the series of private schools he's attended. Each time, the family has had to go to court to get approval for funding and to document Benjamin's progress.

Getting help for children with high IQs but "whose brains are wired differently" or who have sensory problems is harder than getting education for children who are mentally retarded or physically disabled, she said.

If the public schools hadn't covered Benjamin's bills, Elizabeth Eby said, "we couldn't have sent him to any special education school." Yet while winning a lawsuit "gets you the money, you don't get real justice," she said. "You don't get recognition of what the needs are for children, and you don't get the opportunity to improve the system."

A Mother's Fear

Many parents do not have attorneys. And many do not want their children taken away from their neighborhoods and friends. They expect the school system to do what it is supposed to: spot children who have a handicap to learning and give them help in overcoming it.

"They said to give the schools a chance," said Roberta Cooper, who spotted Derale's speech disability in kindergarten, got him help through Gallaudet University and then watched his progress fall away when the public schools took over.

From being articulate, he slipped to the point that "now you can't understand him," his mother said. "My biggest fear is that he's going to be lost in this system." With the help of a private advocate, Derale, now 11, has since been sent to a private day school in Rockville, with the District paying the bills.

Willie's Story

Willie Williamson was not so fortunate. He was declared in need of special education in 1984, while in kindergarten. When he was 10, the school system did its only reevaluation of Willie and put him in ungraded classes at Fletcher Johnson Junior High School for three years.

"They wrote him off," said advocate Opalack, who has taken on Willie's case. By 18, he had been socially promoted to the 10th grade, although he could not read or write.

An aunt, Cynthia Savage, took guardianship of Willie in 1994 and requested his folder from the schools. It was a thin affair with only a few papers. "They didn't even know there was a Willie Williamson," Savage said.

Willie's neighborhood is a tough one. On the street outside his mother's apartment, a white chalk figure outlines the final pose of the latest shooting victim.

One day this winter, Willie huddled on the couch of his mother's apartment, a walk-up with a broken lock and bare walls dimly splashed by the light of a bare bulb. As always, Willie wore a thick Army jacket over his thin frame. He is wary, says little and often hides in a closet. He smiled broadly at Opalack but erupted in a cursing rage when his mother implied that he was slow.

In 12 years of school, Willie said, he remembered only one teacher who took an interest in him. "She was the only one that said he wasn't the worst in the class," explained his mother, Dorothy Williamson, who relinquished guardianship because her sister was better able to cope with the complexities of Willie's case.

"I'm not saying that all of the problems that occurred in Willie's life are the responsibility of the school system," his aunt said. "But even if you have a disability, you have a right to learn, a right to achieve goals, even small goals. Willie never had the chance."

Last fall, the system finally moved to help Willie -- after he pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. As a condition of probation, Willie was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Virginia. There, maybe he will learn a trade. Maybe he will learn to read. Maybe he will learn just to survive, his aunt said.

"I hope that one day, Willie will be able to read a few lines in a newspaper, that he will be able to differentiate between anger and sadness, that he will be able to go to the movies or a playground or even a gallery," Savage said. "He ought to be able to see that life is more pleasant than being in the 'hood."

Too often, the differences between those students forgotten in the system and those who end up in private schools seem to follow racial lines. Robert Burch, head of the six independent hearing officers who review formal complaints about the D.C. schools, estimated that 30 to 40 percent of the hearings on private special education placement involve cases from mostly white upper Northwest Washington, although only 4 percent of the District's school population is white.

"Upper-middle-class white parents are getting their kids provided a private education at the public expense, while poor black kids are getting no education," said Chassy, the former head of policy for the federal Office of Special Education. He had joined in a suit, dismissed on procedural grounds last year, that sought to force the District to provide adequate services for all students.

Myers said the racial disparity "sounds pretty unreasonable, because it sounds like we're not doing as good a job identifying and serving some of the children's needs, namely Afro-American children. We've been historically driven a little bit by people who have better access to legal tools."

"I know there are parents who have milked the system," said Susan E. Sutler, who has been a hearing examiner and an attorney for the schools and now runs a clinic at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law that represents mostly poor families. But she said her clients want the public schools in their neighborhoods to work.

"My client is a black teenager who doesn't want to go to a white, private school. And he will not get on 'the cheese bus,' " the nickname for the big yellow school bus that transports only special education students throughout the city and brings a visible stigma when it stops outside a house.

The law requires special education students to be integrated into regular classes whenever possible. Nationally, an average of 23 percent of special education students are put in separate classes, according to federal reports. In the District, the percentage is twice that, reminiscent of a "1960s and 1970s model" of separation, federal officials say.

Fighting for a Grandson

Rosemary McKinney with her grandson, Anthony.
(Post photo by James A. Parcell)

Rosemary McKinney, like many others, has had to learn the jargon and intricacies of the special education system to try to get D.C. schools to provide proper service for her grandson, Anthony.

Born of a mother who used PCP and other drugs, according to school social worker evaluations, Anthony stuttered badly and had a poor attention span. His grandmother helped get him speech therapy in elementary school. For a while, the system was working.

"He was coming along fine -- learning his ABC's and counting real good," McKinney said of the 7-year-old. When she moved to the neighborhood served by Webb Elementary School in Northeast Washington in September, she asked the school to enroll him in its special education class. Seven months later, she found that school officials had misplaced Anthony's records.

"They just put him in a regular class and left him there," she said. "Now, he writes backwards. He doesn't say anything about school. He's missed a whole year now. I don't know what's going to happen to him."

A request to school authorities for a response from Webb was not answered.

McKinney, who lives with a son and three grandchildren, is often exhausted by the chore of fighting the schools. "You need a lawyer just to get them to do anything."