Furious over the city’s “stunning ignorance” of the crisis facing its special-education system, a federal judge has given the District of Columbia one week to come up with a cost-fixing schedule — or face contempt charges.
In an unusually caustic order, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman has ordered State Superintendent Deborah L. Gist and schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to come up with a policy for setting rates with the thousands of private schools and vendors with which it does business.
Saying that he has “even more concern that there is a bigger misunderstanding in” the school agencies, Friedman gave the city until Tuesday to come up with a rate schedule.
Friedman goes so far as to suggest that the city lawyers who signed the brief didn’t actually read it.
“The defendants’ response demonstrates a stunning ignorance of the history of [the] litigation and the operative orders issued by this court,” the judge wrote. “The only plausible explanation is that the attorneys whose names appear on the signature page … must not have read it. …”
Friedman’s order comes after a blistering report from Elise Baach, a court-appointed monitor of the city’s special education system. She wrote that city officials bungled an effort to fix rates for outside schools and spent more time fighting among themselves than addressing the problems.
D.C. is under a consent decree that stems from a class-action suit filed by special-education children who had been placed in private schools. Under federal law, a special-education child can obtain a private education at public expense if he or she can prove that the local school isn’t up to the task. Children in the lawsuit, known as “Petties,” claimed that the city’s failure to pay the outside schools on time was depriving them of their rights to an education.
The Petties litigation has cost the public millions of dollars in legal fees and court costs and tens of millions more to implement court-ordered reforms. In fiscal 2008, the city will pay $137 million to send about 2,300 students to outside schools. It will pay another $81 million to ship the children there.
Melissa Merz, spokeswoman for the D.C. Attorney General’s Office, sent out an e-mail statement saying that the city “is in the midst of a major transformation” of the school system, “which we are confident will finally result … in better educational services.”
Got a tip on D.C.’s schools? Call Bill Myers at 202-459-4956 or e-mail [email protected].
