Praising reforms initiated by Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso, a special master overseeing a 25-year-old special-education lawsuit is recommending less judicial oversight at most of the city's elementary schools.
Alonso publicly committed yesterday to ending the wide-ranging case that costs the school system millions of dollars a year by 2011, when his contract as CEO is up for renewal. But much work lies ahead to improve services to special-education students in the system's middle and high schools.
"Within two years, we're out of this, or we're not acceptable," Alonso said at a news conference that he and state Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick called to celebrate the findings of a report filed by Amy Totenberg, the special master. The city school system and the state are co-defendants in the federal class action suit brought in 1984 by lawyers for students with disabilities.
During Alonso's first year and a half on the job, Totenberg wrote, "he has brought a high level of urgency, drive, candor, and intellectual command to school reform efforts in Baltimore that had not been evident during the many preceding years. ... His leadership represents an extraordinary opportunity for the [system] to leap forward in its delivery to educational services to students with disabilities, as well as to all students."
Totenberg's report also praises the work of state-appointed managers who were sent by the court to help oversee special education in 2005. She asks that the system and the state recommend to the court what the managers' role should be going forward.
The system is trying to get out from under a consent decree and its costly legal and monitoring fees. In 2000, the parties in the suit agreed to 15 measures by which the system would be evaluated. Over the years, the court agreed that the system was in compliance with eight of the 15.
Totenberg is recommending that, in most elementary schools, U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis make three of the seven remaining measures inactive: one involving the system's ability to discipline special-education students appropriately and two involving the federal law that they be educated alongside their non-disabled peers to the greatest extent possible. For years, students were punished without proper consideration of their disabilities and segregated unnecessarily.
