At last night’s Board meeting Tom Green, the Director of Student Services & Curriculum Instruction, explained how the District can improve its special education program by establishing additional classes to address the needs of kids who are currently educated outside the District.
This is potentially wonderful news, as few parents like the idea of bussing their kids to distant sites for their education. Educating students within our community makes them more a part of our community.
And, demonstrating that you can sometimes do well by doing good, the change could reduce costs by $600,000 per year or more. Given the terrible fiscal situation California public education finds itself in, this is also welcome news.
Tom, and Mary Jude Doerpinghaus, the District’s Coordinator of Special Education, deserve kudos for coming up with and structuring this idea. It’s the kind of thinking I was hoping I’d see when we enhanced the District’s special education leadership.
But there’s another player in the District who also deserves credit. Some managers see a problem, and try to solve it themselves. That’s okay, but doing that a lot makes your overall success dependent upon one person.
Other managers choose to bring on board experts to solve the problem, support them, and get out of the way. That requires a leader whose ego doesn’t require his or her face on each and every success.
Steve Mitrovich is that kind of leader. And, since I forgot to thank him for his role in this positive development last night, I’m going to do it here instead.
So, thanks, Steve.
And now, please jump back on those 4,372 other problems we’re facing :).
I wholeheartedly appreciate the district’s efforts to save much needed funds for use with the general school population. As a parent of a child who receives sepcial education services through NPAs, however, I was a bit surprised by the presentation of this particular cut at the meeting on Tuesday.
While school districts can sometimes provide appropriate services for some children in-house, that has not been my experience with this district. Indeed, the few in-house professionals who have worked with my child have offered services quite inappropriate for my child’s needs and the district has been significantly out of compliance in the services that have been offered. Moreover, many NPAs are more highly specialized than in house professionals and can often offer more targeted services.
So, while I am happy to get on board and support the district in these dire financial times, please do not present it as a win-win for everyone. For those children in special ed who will not receive the same quality services once they are moved in house and for their families, it is not necessarily a win.
Having been at the meeting you know that the full presentation on the subject was quite a bit more involved than my summary here. Not all children would be eligible for coming back to a District-run class. More importantly, the decision to return a student to the District is not one that the District can make unilaterally. In fact, I believe I recall Tom Green saying that parents have the final say.
I agree that the District’s special ed program has been in need of significant improvement for years. My sense is that Tom and Mary Jude, by making changes and providing better leadership, are moving it pretty rapidly in the right direction. But my recognition of their, and Steve’s, efforts shouldn’t be taken to mean everything’s perfect and there’s nothing left to do. There’s a lot of work ahead of us.