Right off the bat, I will point out that Special Education has been a disaster in the district.  Why?  We get sued straight to hell.  It’s partly our fault, and we’ve drastically reduced lawsuits, thankfully.  And it’s mostly a cultural problem in the world of lawyers.

Why?  Well, students in Special Education programs have individualized plans that must be followed to the letter.  Some of these plans aren’t constructed well, some of these plans have unrealistic goals, and sometimes kids and parents don’t do their own parts related to these plans and then blame teachers or the district.  The problem is that it’s cheaper to settle lawsuits than to fight them.  So districts, not just Scranton, continually lose money because of this.  The findings in this section of the report point out that the district had poor accounting methods for years and actual costs are hard to determine.  I’m going to guess that, as I read, our poor accounting will also be addressed.  Thankfully, our new business manager is excellent.

We have some new, great people running Special Ed for the district and we’ve reduced the dollars we pay out dramatically.  But it needs work, so the plan addresses it.

One thing I don’t see here, and I really wanted to see, was the in-housing of the legal side of special education.  As in, instead of hiring a lawyer at an outside firm at an hourly rate, we should spend $150,000 on a salaried, full-time lawyer and fight every frivolous suit until its bitter end.  The army of lawyers suing us would have to wait longer for their windfalls, they’d have to work harder to prove their cases, and the Scranton School District would reduce costs.

Here’s are the initiatives:

• Evaluate Space.  Because of coming school closures and realignments, Special Education, whose space requirements are specific, has to be examined and accounted for as the district closes buildings.
• Examine (and fix) the supervisory structure.  Basically, there needs to be accountability and a review process to make sure everything is going according to plan.  Because we lack this structure, we leave ourselves open to the aforementioned problems.  This specifically references a position that was cut, so I’m guessing we’ll see a recommendation to bring it back.
• Train teachers.  Professional development is important, especially because teaching is always changing (mandates, new laws, etc.) and so given the nature of special education, we need to make sure teachers have the background necessary to do the job.
• In-house speech pathologists.  So a lot of what the district does involves contracting out with outside groups.  So it may be cheaper to hire our own speech pathologists and deploy them, rather than paying outside entities.  This will be examined.
• Reduce lawsuits.  The plan calls for “Developing a plan” to reduce lawsuits.  I refer you to my above suggestion, which I will propose.
• Better reporting.  I learned as soon as I got on the Board, and as soon as I got talking to Dr. Finan, that we don’t track what must be tracked.  So tracking things like lawsuits, staffing, costs of services, and student counts.  These reports will be provided to the Board.  This is a good idea.  The Board should know where things are at and, to be quite honest with you, Board members don’t have the background in education that I do, so they need more information to make informed decisions.
• External audit of special education.  I kind of thought of the plan as a bit of an external audit, but this initiative would further examine it.  Given that Scranton’s problems are so historically ingrained, an outside eye would likely understand best practices in a way that we would not.

There you have it.  Special Education.  Any questions, I’m here!