A parent of a special needs student at a well-regarded New York charter school has accused school officials of not providing the accommodations and special services called for in her child’s individualized education program (IEP) and instead trying to force her to remove him from the school, the New York Daily News reports. And she’s got secretly recorded tapes to prove it.
The newspaper has dubbed these the “charter school tapes,” and they allegedly contain a conversation between the child’s parent and officials at the Success Academy, which prides itself in not pushing out special needs students or those with behavior problems while maintaining high scores on statewide standardized tests. We haven’t verified the tapes or confirmed any of the conversations or their contents with those who were reportedly taped—nor did the paper report any such confirmation—but if the conversations with official representatives of the Success Academy are real, they nullify the school’s claims that special needs students aren’t forced to leave the charter school.
Our “second source” on this one is the Network for Public Education, a new group whose journalistic integrity we can’t be certain of. They reported the story on their blog, here, but there’s no indication they verified it either. In any event, this story lacks corroboration, but it is enlightening enough for us to post it. We can’t vouch for it, though.
Parents also say, according to the Daily News, that officials are falling back on a discipline policy known as “zero tolerance” to suspend special needs students at a very high rate, leading many to question the policy and the school’s motives. “There was a point when I was getting a call every day for every minor thing,” the paper quoted the parent as saying. “They would say he was crying excessively, or not looking straight forward, or throwing a tantrum, or not walking up the stairs fast enough, or had pushed another kid.”
The student in question is a special needs student, whose IEP plan calls for daily speech therapy and occupational therapy and requires him to be placed in a smaller class, one staffed by both a regular teacher and a special education teacher. That hasn’t happened, the paper reported, and the reporter claims that a Success Academy official can be heard saying at one point, “We’re technically out of compliance because we aren’t able to meet what his IEP recommends for him.”
Editorial
I’m not intimately familiar with the charter between the Success Academy and the New York State Education Department or the New York City schools. However, there are two possibilities, basically, for how that arrangement might be structured:
- If the charter is an independent Local Education Agency (LEA) under New York law, that charter school bears the exact same legal requirements for providing special education services as any other LEA (or district).
- If it’s part of an existing LEA, the LEA (or district) retains most or all of the responsibility for special education in the charter school. The charter school is considered a school within that LEA and is responsible for following LEA policy, which certainly includes honoring students’ IEPs.
Either way, the charter school can’t get out of providing the services that are called for in the student’s IEP, since it’s a public school. Whether the responsibility for those services falls on the school or the district is completely irrelevant in the eyes of the student and his parents.
Now, it’s one thing to say your test scores are high because you’re doing a good job of teaching all students, a link that remains flimsy, but it’s another thing entirely to achieve those high test scores by forcing students out who don’t perform well on standardized tests. If the latter is closer to the Success Academy’s modus operandi—and if the tapes are legitimate—it casts a shadow on charter operators everywhere.