District of Columbia education officials have abandoned an elaborate, multimillion-dollar computer database that was supposed to help it tackle its special education crisis.
D.C. bought a software package called Encore and spent tens of millions of dollars in training, updates and maintenance on it. Encore was supposed to allow education officials to use a few keystrokes to record key information on children in special education services and then access it easily.
But in a report to the U.S. Department of Education obtained by The Examiner, city officials said they were bringing the curtain down onEncore.
“DCPS is currently relying on Klemm Analysis Group data rather than Encore, whose data has been regularly incorrect,” State Superintendent Deborah L. Gist wrote.
The Klemm Analysis Group is a private contractor run by Rebecca Klemm, a statistician and D.C. arts patron who has served on the federal court monitoring team supervising D.C.’s collapsing $300 million special education system. Klemm is taking a leave of absence from her court job, and her company will be paid $600,000 over six months, plus another $167,000 in expenses, to help the schools track 11,000 special education students.
D.C. has admitted in court that it routinely violates the rights of its mentally ill or disabled children in part because it doesn’t track them properly. Encore was supposed to address that.
But sources tell The Examiner that education officials didn’t bother to train their staff on the use of Encore and didn’t check to make sure records were actually being put in the system.
Despite D.C.’s problems with the system, Montgomery County — often regarded as having one of the nation’s best public school systems — has recently purchased Encore to help it track special education students. In fact, Encore’s parent company, Spectrum K12 School Solutions Inc., claims on itsWeb site that its software is used to track 10 percent of the country’s special education students and is used in 20 of the top 100 school districts.
