Special Education in NJ Yields Unknown Costs (NY)

November 24, 2010

Johnny Falotico always loved goingto class. But his first two years of high school were so miserable, thedisabled teen used to pick his lip raw and pretend to be sick.

What had changed was his special-education program. His parents believed it wasn’taddressing the gaps in his basic life skills – how to cross the street, read asign or write his name.

They complained, but got nowhere.They sued the Central Regional School District in Berkeley, and eventuallyJohnny got the extra help he needed. But for the Faloticos, the price wassteep: $35,000 in legal fees, a nearly shattered marriage and the loss of twocritical developmental years for their son, now 16.

Although relatively few New Jerseyparents file lawsuits against their local school districts, the Faloticos’experience highlights severe problems within New Jersey’s special-education system. There is littl e doubt that special education and dedicatedteachers help thousands of children each year deal with, and even overcome,their disabilities. Yet at the same time, the programs are hampered by fiscaland educational dysfunction.

"It’s just not working,"Johnny’s mother, Patricia Carter-Falotico, 41, of Berkeley said of special education. "The people incharge are the roadblocks to your child’s education. They are there to save thedistrict money, not to provide your child with what he or she needs."

An eight-month Asbury Park Pressinvestigation found that the system is a $3 billion a year bureaucracy plaguedby unchecked costs, lax oversight, racial bias and unproven programs.

Key findings from the investigation:

1) Hundreds of millions of dollarsfor private schools. Taxpayers support a state-sanctioned network of 176private special-education school s,some of which pay their top employees more than the governor. More than $580million a year is spent by public schools on private tuition alone.

The private-school tuition bills insome low-income urban districts are spiraling out of control, thwarting effortsto turn around failing public schools.

2) A criminal probe and laxoversight of money. Authorities are investigating charges that the Trentonpublic school system misspent millions of dollars in special-education funds – right under the nose of a New JerseyDepartment of Education monitor. Bogus time sheets, questionable moneytransfers and unauthorized payments to private schools that students neverattended, were found by the state auditor. He said he now suspects such abusesmany be more commonplace than anyone realizes.

No one, not even the state EducationDepartment, keeps track of how much money is actually spent on special education every year. One2005 estimate pegged the total at $3.3 billion – meaning 18 cents of everydollar that schools spent that year went to special education.

3) Racial disparity. Black studentswho aren’t truly disabled routinely have been placed in special-education programs, a form of segregation that hasbeen tolerated for decades, critics say. They say it has become a way forschools to deal with hard-to-teach students – and snag more state and federalaid.

A Press analysis of education datafound that money played a significant role in determining whether a special-education student attended aprivate day school or was schooled within the district’s own buildings.Upper-income districts and the lowest-income districts – which are mostlyfunded with state tax dollars and have a higher percentage of minority students- were almost twice as likely to send a child to a private school thanmiddle-income districts, the Press found.

4) Lack of standards. Parents andpolicymakers have no way of knowing whether special-education programs are effective or not becauseschools aren’t required to report or even collect such performance data.Teachers who work with autistic students aren’t required to know how to educatestudents with the complex disorder.

Rose Valendo, a special-education teacher at Academy Learning Center, aregional public school in Monroe that specializes in autism, said her collegeeducation classes didn’t cover autism.

Had Academy Learning not providedher with training when she was hired, she said, "I would have walked inhere completely blind about what this program was all about and what this(autistic) population needed."

5) Parental distress. The lack ofconsistent standards creates a crazy quilt of good and bad programs across thestate, forcing some parents to move from district to district to get theservices their children need, or to spend thousands of dollars on tutoring andtherapies their local schools won’t provide. Some parents lie about where theylive to ensure their child gets into the best school.

6) Questionable choices. To trimspending, some districts have pulled students out of private schools to sendthem to special-education programsin other districts. Yet one Ocean County public school now charges more thanmost pri vate schools – defeating the original intent of the move and disruptingthe lives of disabled students.

Many other states share similarproblems. New Jersey is part of a national special education system that was created in 1975 by afederal law that’s now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act,or IDEA.

"It’s a very big problem. It’slike it’s got tentacles all over the place," said Nancy Saling, the Faloticos’special-education advocate, whowas a special-education teacherin the Barnegat public schools for 30 years.

"I don’t know how you coulddisentangle them," she said. "The saddest thing is that there arechildren stuck in the middle who are just not getting the education that’spromised to them in IDEA."

Triantafillos Parlapanides, theCentral Regional schools superintendent, says the district "ben t overbackwards" to try to satisfy the Faloticos.

Johnny has multiple disorders thataffect his ability to swallow, move and learn.

At the time, Parlapanides said, thehigh school didn’t have the type of life skills program that the family wantedfor their son. This year, for the first time, there is such a program, he said.

But Johnny has moved on. To settlethe case, Central Regional agreed to send him to a $50,000-a-year private dayschool in Eatontown. The district also reimbursed the Faloticos for their legalexpenses.

Today, Johnny is a changed teenager.Now he loves going to school and has made significant strides.

"It makes me feel great thathe’s making progress, but it also makes me feel bad, because if he was placedthere earlier in his life then maybe he would be further along than he isnow," Carter-Falotico said. "It shouldn’t be as hard as it is."</span&g t;

It is not merely a few disgruntledparents who feel that way. A presidential commission warned in 2002 that the special-education system had veeredoff course and required "fundamental rethinking."

Yet at a time when "accountability"is the watchword in public education, specialeducation continues to fly under the radar. The Race to the Top reform plan NewJersey unveiled earlier this year calls for no major changes in special education beyond hiring morequalified teachers.

That puts the onus on parents tohold the system accountable.

"Unless a parent takes it ontheir own initiative, these kids get swept under the carpet," said WilliamRobinson, 48, of Union Beach, whose 11-year-old son has dyslexia, adevelopmental reading disorder.

Robinson says he spent $250,000 onattorney and expert fees in the past three years, trying to get his son’sschool to use a shelved reading program that could benefit the boy immensely.

Union Beach Schools SuperintendentArthur J. Waltz declined comment on the case, which is still working its waythrough the federal court system.

"You see the money pouring intospecial education, but we’re notlooking at getting the best return on the money we’re spending," Robinsonsaid. "There’s no accountability, or should I say, the accountability isso low, it’s really not a true standard."

‘Much to be proud of’

Supporters of New Jersey’s special-education system, whichserves some 200,000 students statewide, say such criticisms are unfair.

They say New Jersey, which was oneof the first states in the country to mandate special education classes for the handicapped a century ago,has made steady progress in the decade since federal monitors criticized thestate’s "ineffective" oversight of special-education programs in public and private schools.

Barbara Gantwerk, director of thestate Education Department’s Office of SpecialEducation Programs, said the department’s monitoring efforts, which zero in ondistricts that don’t show enough progress toward meeting federal benchmarks,are far more robust today.

Moreover, she said, with help fromtens of millions of dollars in state grants, many districts have made stridestoward reducing the segregation of disabled students in costly specializedschools, and raising academic performance to meet the demands of the federal NoChild Left Behind Act.

Also, she said, parental surveyresults and the fact that fewer than 100 & lt;/a>special-education disputes per year wind up in court suggestthat the vast majority of special-educationparents are satisfied with the services their children are receiving.

"I think we have much to beproud of," Gantwerk said.

Costly private schools

Under the federal law, students withdisabilities are supposed to be educated in the least restrictive environmentpossible, ideally in regular-education classrooms.

New Jersey, however, has a longhistory of placing its disabled students in separate public and privateschools.

In fact, it relies on these schoolsmore than any other state, by a wide margin.

The practice of sending disabledstudents to schools outside their home districts is so engrained in New Jerseythat decades of regulatory pressure have done little to reduce it.

"It’s a very complex operationto change the way people think and the way school districts operate,"observed Paula Lieb, who heads the New Jersey Coalition for InclusiveEducation, a nonprofit group that opposes educating disabled students insegregated settings.

In 2007, frustrated by a lack ofprogress on the issue, a coalition of disability-rights groups, led by theEducation Law Center, filed a federal lawsuit against the state Department ofEducation, seeking wholesale changes in staff training, program development andthe state’s monitoring of special-educationprograms. The case is still in the early stages of litigation.

In total, 14,556 students, or 7.5percent of the state’s total special-educationpopulation, were educated in separate public or private schools in 2009,according to state figures. That percentage is down from just over 9 percent in2007.

Out-of-district school placementscost districts $1.3 billion in tuition and transportation expenditures in 2005,nearly 40 percent of the $3.3 billion spent on special education that year, according to a report by the NewJersey School Boards Association. The total amount did not include staffbenefits, estimated at more than $400 million.

The vast majority of these students,more than 12,000 per year, wind up in the state’s 176 private day schools forthe disabled. There are 14 such schools in Monmouth County and seven in OceanCounty.

"These schools have goodreputations," said Gerard M. Thiers, executive director of ASAH, anonprofit group that represents 135 private special-education schools across the state. "Our outcomestudies show these kids perform very well when they get out of school and inschool."

In effect, though, school districtshave created a separate school system that is privately operated buttaxpayer-funded.

Districts sent more than $580million to these schools in 2008-09, the latest year available on record. Mostof the state’s private schools for the disabled charge more than $51,000 perstudent, more than a year’s tuition at Harvard University Medical School.

Three schools charge more than$110,000 per year. Concordia Learning Center at St. Joseph’s School for theBlind, in Jersey City, has the highest tuition, $114,457 per student, accordingto tentative 2010-11 rates.

The private schools are regulated bythe state Education Department, which certifies their tuition rates, based ontheir operating expenses over the prior two years.

The state also stipulates whatprivate schools can pay their employees.

The private payrolls are supposed tobe on par with the public-sector jobs. For the 2009-10 school year, forexample, the state capped compensation for administrators at just over$215,000.

But some of those administrators runschools with just a few dozen students.

Robert E. White, executive directorof the Oakwood School, a nonprofit private school for the neurologicallyimpaired in Tinton Falls, was paid $168,721 in base pay plus another $74,413 inadditional compensation in 2008, the school’s tax records show. The school hadan average daily enrollment of 43 students in the 2008-09 school year,according to state enrollment data. New Jersey’s governor is paid $175,000 ayear.

The Somerset Hills LearningInstitute, a nonprofit private autism school in Bedminster that had an averagedaily enrollment of 26 students in 2008-09, paid its executive director, KevinBrothers, a salary of $165,385 in 2008, the school’s tax records show. Theschool spent nearly $300,000 on fundraising that year.

"The clinical demands on us ona daily basis are significant," Brothers said. "It’s not justproviding an education, it’s providing treatment services as well."

Other examples of private schoolsalaries:

1) The director of the LearningCenter for Exceptional Children in Clifton in Bergen County, Linda Buonauro,received $203,654 in base pay in 2008, the school’s tax records show. She saidshe has held the job for 38 years. The school’s average daily attendance thatyear was 94 students.

2) A speech therapist at the ForumSchool in Waldwick in Bergen County was paid $223,700 in base pay and receivedanother $89,526 in benefits and other compensation in 2007, according to theschool’s tax records. The therapist has worked at the school for more than 30years.

3) In 2007, the top fivehighest-paid employees at the Allegro School, a private autism school in CedarKnolls in Morris County, included the custodian, who made $85,715, and ateaching assistant, whose base pay was $84,004, the school’s tax records show.The school had fewer than 100 students enrolled in 2008-09.

Thiers, of the private-schoolsgroup, said the average private-school administrator is paid about $150,000.

"It’s a different job than apublic school," he said. "Basically, you’re dealing with kids who arevery difficult to educate."

Private schools also offer"significantly lower" health and retirement benefits than publicschool employees receive, Thiers said, and many schools operate year-round.

Teachers at the Search Day Program,a private school in Ocean Township that specializes in autism, frequently visittheir students’ homes on their off hours to help parents with problems they maybe experiencing, without any compensation, said Katherine Solana, the school’sexecutive director.

She cited an example where staffmembers worked with an autistic student’s family after school to determine whythe boy was having tantrums on the school bus. It turned out that he feltoverheated in the back of the bus, but he didn’t have the verbal skills to letthe driver know. The staff gave the student a note pad, word-picture cards andjuice for the ride home, and the problems ceased, she said.

"Sometimes, a simple thing likethat keeps a child’s life from being turned upside down,& amp;quot; Solana said."We keep an eye on things like that."

Wealth disparity

In New Jersey, the lowest-incomeurban districts, which are largely subsidized by the state, are the top usersof private schools for specialeducation, according to a Press analysis of 2007 placement data. Thesedistricts include Asbury Park, Keansburg and New Brunswick.

The second-highest users of privateschools are upper-middle-class suburban districts, such as Wall, Middletown andFreehold Regional, the Press found.

Peg Kinsell, public policy directorfor the Statewide Parents Advocacy Network of New Jersey, a nonprofitdisability-rights group, said urban districts often lack the teachers andphysical infrastructure needed to accommodate students with more seriousdisabilities. At the same time, parents in the wealthier suburban districts arebetter able to afford attorneys and push for a private-school placement.

"It becomes an administrativeconvenience to just write a check to send kids to an out-of-districtplacement," she said.

In the urban districts, that meansmillions of dollars in state aid that’s flowing into these districts everyyear, ostensibly to improve the public schools, is winding up in the coffers ofprivate schools instead.

The practice has come under freshscrutiny because of the unfolding criminal probe in the Trenton district.

"Nobody was minding thestore," said state Sen. Shirley K. Turner, D-Mercer.

"My greatest concern is, ofcourse, that this is not unique to the city of Trenton," Turner said."I’m sure there are other districts around the state that are in a similarsituation, but it hasn’t been uncovered because nobody is providing thenecessary oversight."

While Trento n placed 12 percent ofits special-education students inprivate schools in 2007, the private-school placement rate in Irvington,another low-income and mostly state-funded district, was nearly 30 percent, thePress found.

That was the highest rate in thestate among the 286 districts with at least 160 special-education students. That minimum enrollment figure,just above the median for the state, was used to screen out smaller districts whoseplacement rates were skewed by having relatively few disabled students.

Irvington spent more than $18million in tuition alone to send 328 students, at an average of $54,800 each,to private schools in 2008-09, its budget shows. Irvington’s schools chief,E.J. Hasty, did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Franklin Township in Somerset Countyhad the state’s second-highest placement rate, 21 percent, followed by AsburyPark, at 19 percent. In Ocean County, Lakewood had the top rate, 11 percent.

"It’s one of the thi ngs we’retrying to change," said Denise Lowe, the schools superintendent in AsburyPark.

This year, the district opened analternative high school that made it possible to bring at least seven special-education students back inthe district, she said.

Matawan-Aberdeen’s rate was 14percent in 2007, ninth-highest in the state.

"It doesn’t surprise me,"said Richard O’Malley, who was hired as the district’s superintendent in 2007."One of the things I recognized right away was the number of students wewere sending to private schools. We have completely reversed that trend, butprior to that, that was the mindset."

‘Black box’ standards

So little is known about the truecosts and effectiveness of these programs, not just in New Jersey butnationwide, that some have likened specialeducation to a "black box." No one knows what’s inside or even how itworks, exactly.

While IDEA, the federal lawregulating special education,requires schools to collect reams of data on their disabled students, itprovides few benchmarks that parents and policymakers can use to gauge howeffective a special-educationprogram is in a given school, district or state.

In its 2002 report, the President’sCommission on Excellence in SpecialEducation noted that schools are expected to comply with more than 814different procedural requirements, few of which relate directly to studentperformance.

"Ironically," the reportstated, "even if a school complied with the more than 814 requirements,families and Congress would have no assurance children were makingprogress."

Another study found that teachersspend more time filling out paperwork related to all these rules than they doactually working with students.

"If we want to measure cost andeffectiveness, we need cost and effect," said Tammy Kolbe, an assistantresearch professor at the University of Connecticut’s Center for EducationPolicy Analysis.

There is little available data oneither, she said.

Kolbe said New Jersey isn’t alone inthis regard. In fact, she has yet to come across a state that has this kind ofcost and performance data.

While New Jersey spends an estimated$3.3 billion a year on specialeducation, there is no way to determine if that amount is higher or lower thanthe per-student costs in other states. There are no recent national studiescomparing expenses.

The last time New Jerseycommissioned an in-depth anal ysis of special-educationcosts was 10 years ago. It found that the cost of educating a student withautism was $32,000, nearly four times the rate for a general-education student.

It was only in 2004 that the law wasamended to require an annual state performance review that includes data abouttest results, graduation and dropout rates.

Brenda Considine, coordinator of theNew Jersey Coalition for SpecialEducation Funding Reform, an advocacy group, is among those who believe moreextensive information is needed. The group, which represents the interests ofvarious disability-rights organizations as well as the private-schoolsassociation, said the state Education Department needs to conduct a long-termstudy on special education.

"We keep pumping millions ofdollars into a system in which we’re not looking at outcomes," she said."Nobody knows what happens to these kids."

However, Alexa Posny, assistantsecretary of the U.S. Office of SpecialEducation and Rehabilitative Services, believes the 2004 law, which was craftedto work in conjunction with No Child Left Behind standards, strikes anappropriate balance.

"There will always be a focuson process" in order to safeguard students’ rights, said Posny, formerlythe education commissioner in Kansas.

Parents have the right to assesstheir child’s progress based on annual goals and objectives in the student’sIndividualized Education Plan, or IEP.

While these goals are supposed to beconcrete, parents and special-educationadvocates say some districts use goals that are so nebulous that it’s easy toclaim they’re being met.

"I have one client whose goalswere repeated for 12 years," said special-educationadvocate Bobbie Gallagher of Brick , who specializes in autism cases.

"For 12 years, he worked on thesame things," she said. "Who checks that? Why is he still matchinghis name to a board?"

This story is the first part of asix-day series. It originally ran First in Print in the Nov. 14, 2010, editionof The Sunday Press.