BCS Underserves Students with Severe Disabilities – Email to SCCOE Board
To: SCCOE Board and Staff
Re: Is BCS Serving SpEd Students with Severe Disabilities?
This email, and the 40-page attachment, are a follow-on to my September 20, 2021 email “Are the Special Education Public Service Goals of LASD and BCS Aligned?” In these materials, I explore the following question:
As a publicly funded school, is BCS subject to the same public service mandate to serve all students, including SpEd students with severe disabilities?
Please see our research into how BCS under enrolls students with disabilities.
Beginning with the relevant law that sets the framework:
The California Charter Act indicates that a charter school will achieve a balance of special education pupils that is reflective of the general population residing within the territorial jurisdiction of the school district to which the charter is submitted.
Here are the following key observations from my exploration of this question:
3% of the students in our area have relatively severe SpEd disabilities. Please see Attachments A and C.
60% of these children are identified by age 3 and 80% of these students are identified by age 6. Please see Attachments C, D & E.
There is little evidence BCS has been, or currently is, proportionately serving this group of students with severe SpEd disabilities. Please see Attachments A and B.
Proportionate SpEd enrollment between LASD and BCS would require BCS to serve/enroll at least 20 more (and LASD 20 less) SpEd students with all of them being students with relatively severe disabilities. Please see Attachment F.
There are a number of BCS benefits (lower costs, higher test scores, etc.,) to not serving a proportionate number students with severe SpEd disabilities.
The offsetting costs of each of these BCS benefits have become the responsibility of LASD. These costs lead to an inequitable burden on LASD students. Unequal assumption of financial costs between BCS and LASD is a systematic inequity in education resources.
The SCCOE, in the 2012 and 2018 charter renewal processes, and again in May 2021, in a public Notice of Concern letter to BCS, highlighted the requirement to proportionately serve disadvantaged students
As an observer in the local community, it appears that the BCS board is reluctant to act without direction from SCCOE, which includes severe consequences for failure to comply. Please see Attachments B, I and K.
The BCS SpEd reputation, and the data reflecting their practices, does not seem to measure up to the LASD reputation and practices.
Segregation by income, language, ethnicity or disability does not teach young people to live with others who are unlike them. The disproportionate composition of current BCS enrollment reveals the cumulative effect of shaping enrollment practices over an extended period of time.
Please see Attachments B, H and I.
Although there are probably many issues the SCCOE Board has privately discussed with the BCS board, three publicly available examples include:
The 2012 SCCOE notification of revoking the charter unless changes were made to lottery forms. Please see Attachment K.
The 2019 very firm guidance from the SCCOE to eliminate the geographic lottery preference. Please see Attachment I.
The May 2021 SCCOE notification of revoking the charter unless changes were made to enrollment of four different groups including students who are English learners, Hispanic, socioeconomically disadvantaged and students with disabilities.
From the data available, it appears that without significant direction from the SCCOE staff and board, the BCS Board may be exploring a minor shift in governance (serving a higher proportion of mild severity, lower-cost-to serve special education students to limit encroachment), while correcting the SpEd diversity imbalance, that includes severe disabilities, calls for serving both (1) more special education students and (2) a mix of disabilities proportionate to LASD.
Adding a preference for SpEd at the kindergarten level of BCS would tend to give priority to the severe SpEd students that BCS most needs to attract, because these students are more often identified before being school-age. Please note that a current board member of the SCCBOE was recently quoted in a local newspaper as saying:
“it wouldn't be legal to institute a preference for a particular race and adding one based on disability status could be challenging because many students aren't assessed for a disability until they are enrolled in school.”
The reporter potentially misunderstood that the comment was probably only related to SpEd students with “relatively mild” disabilities. Although 70% (6% of all LASD and SCC students) of SpEd students have mild disabilities, the remaining 30% (or 3% of all LASD and SCC students) have severe disabilities which are generally identified early in the child’s life and served, by mandate, by the public schools beginning at age three. Approximately 80% of children with severe disabilities are identified by age 6. Please see Attachment A and C.
Hopefully, the SCCOE Board will consider setting specific annual mild and severe SpEd enrollment goals for BCS. For example, annually incrementing toward a 3-year goal of serving 3% severe disability and 6% mild disability SpEd students.
To both base governance decisions, and to identify best practices, it may be helpful to establish a baseline by preparing an independent analysis of the last 3 years of BCS SpEd enrolment, focusing on:
The specific disabilities (using the 13 identified in IDEA)
The specific services offered to each SpEd student
The percent of time in general education class
The retention of SpEd students.
Potentially the SCCOE staff, or the collective local SELPA leadership, or a third-party consultant, could collect the data and prepare an analysis. Ideally, an independent analysis would provide both a clear baseline to establish annual goals, and identify the best practices, which could be shared in the adjacent districts and other SCC districts.
If BCS is unable on its own, in the near term, to serve the requisite mix of severe SpEd students, potentially the SCCOE will consider taking further action to redress the segregation of severe SpEd students and the resulting financial inequity imposed on LASD and its students. Several options are possible and will likely need to be conditioned on the revocation of BCS’s charter (judging from the history of BCS’s need for strong incentives to change behavior). For example:
Requiring BCS to adopt a lottery preference for mild and severe SpEd students; and
Overseeing BCS’s reimbursing LASD for educating more than LASD’s proportional share of the severe SpEd students within the combined LASD/BCS enrollment.
It is not a burden to serve children with severe SpEd needs. In fact, it is the charge and responsibility of all public schools to serve ALL students.
Thank you once again for embracing the public school’s diversity in our community and ensuring equitable treatment for all students and families.
Steve Brown