A state audit has found significant improvement in the Baltimore school system's delivery of services such as speech therapy and counseling to students with disabilities.
State auditors examined the files of 358 special-education students who were entitled to 678 sessions of services between August and December. Twenty-five of the 358 students had a problem with service delivery, a noncompliance rate of 7 percent, down from 30 percent when a similar audit was done a year ago.
But the consent decree in a decades-old lawsuit involving the city's special-education program requires that no more than 2 percent of students with disabilities have their services interrupted over the course of a school year. City schools chief Andr?s Alonso said no school district is meeting that standard.
The problems identified in the audit involved 26 of the 678 services, a noncompliance rate of 4 percent. That's down from 22 percent last year.
Many of the services are provided by outside contractors. Problems can range from issues with scheduling or transportation to a shortage of providers. A national shortage of speech pathologists has made on-time service delivery of speech therapy a challenge.
Officials attribute the improvement to careful tracking and tightened protocols when the companies contracted to provide services don't deliver. In the past, when a student did not receive a service, the company was paid a second time to provide a makeup. Now the companies are financially responsible for the makeups.
The system will try to use the audit findings as leverage to ask a federal judge to relieve it of court oversight in that aspect of its special-education program. The lawsuit costs the system millions of dollars a year in legal and monitoring fees.
"We hope it makes a difference in our getting out" of a provision of a consent decree, said Alonso, who has committed to ending the lawsuit within two years.
After the audit, the state education department lifted a corrective action plan that required the system to submit quarterly reports. "Every time we get out of some kind of corrective action, it is meaningful for the system as a whole," Alonso said.
The system is under six remaining state corrective action plans, and state officials say they will continue to monitor service delivery. The state is a co-defendant in the lawsuit.
