Chalkbeat

Thousands of Philadelphia students are owed special education services from the pandemic

2024-03-07T23:26:49+00:00

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The Philadelphia school district has fallen way behind schedule in providing thousands of students in special education with extra services they did not receive during the pandemic, according to state officials.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education first directed the district to provide compensatory services to students in June after receiving a complaint from the Education Law Center on behalf of families.

According to the complaint, some parents and guardians were still unaware their children were entitled to extra help more than a year after students returned to in-person instruction. Families and advocates fear that many of these students may have suffered lasting damage.

“These are students who were most harmed by 15 to 18 months out of school,” said Margie Wakelin, senior attorney at the law center.

Wakelin said students didn’t receive the math tutoring, speech therapy, intensive phonics instruction, emotional support services, or other interventions that their education plans require.

In a review dated February 23 responding to the complaint, state officials found that the district has for the most part identified the students who need to be evaluated for compensatory services, but likely made decisions about what they were entitled to without properly consulting parents as required.

After analyzing 50 randomly chosen cases from four elementary schools in one of the district’s 16 learning networks, the state found only four in which the required meetings with families had occurred – yet the district made eligibility determinations in 44 of the cases.

“Not everybody is necessarily eligible, but meetings are supposed to happen to determine whether they are entitled to services,” Wakelin said.

The state ordered the district to submit evidence by April 5 that they have followed all the requirements for determining need and are providing appropriate services.

District says they face shortage of special education teachers

The closure of in-person school between March 2020 and September 2021 most severely affected students with disabilities who have either individualized education plans or 504 plans, according to the law center’s complaint. Individualized education plans, which are created by a team of school officials and parents, spell out services to which students are entitled, while 504 plans guarantee accommodations for students with conditions that could interfere with their learning.

The complaint relied on guidance from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights on what districts must do to ensure that all children, regardless of disability, receive a “free and appropriate public education.”

The district received about $528 million in federal COVID relief funding, which was meant to help address learning loss, but budget materials for this fiscal year don’t mention compensatory services as a priority. District officials did estimate in one undated request for proposal that they would need to provide services to as many as 40% of the roughly 22,000 students with disabilities who were eligible. They expected to provide the services between January 2022 and June 2024.

In a statement issued Wednesday, district officials said that they are “working to remediate educational learning loss” from the pandemic, despite a “national shortage of qualified special education teachers and related service providers.” The district opened the school year with 200 teacher vacancies.

The statement also noted that Nathalie Nérée, who has experience in several other large districts including Chicago and Broward County, Florida, became chief of special education and diverse learners at the beginning of this school year.

Under her leadership, the district “is looking forward to building transparent, collaborative and positive relationships with our families, community partners and advocacy groups as we reimagine special education for students in Philadelphia.”

Families have found it difficult to get services

Many families in the school district have found the process to get compensatory services frustrating and have sought help from the Education Law Center.

Yolanda Workman said she and her daughter met with school officials in January on Zoom to discuss services for her grandson, a fifth grader at Emlen Elementary School in Mount Airy who has been diagnosed with a learning disability. The school’s special education liaison didn’t give them much of a chance to speak, she said, and then told them that the child was not entitled to extra services. The liaison also urged them to sign a legal document confirming that.

Workman said they refused to sign and told the liaison they planned to contact an attorney. A few weeks later, they received notice that her grandson was entitled to 75 hours of compensatory services.

But neither Workman nor her daughter could say whether he was receiving the services, or what form they were taking.

Colleen Gibbons-Brown, a special education teacher for ninth and 10th graders at Strawberry Mansion High School, said that she has not seen much evidence that students are getting extra services, or that parents and caregivers have been consulted about what students need and how best to provide it.

“From what I have seen, decisions are not made as a team, but by network case managers and some administrators,” she said. “They are making a call, then informing the parents, [thus] removing parents, teachers and even students from that decision.”

At her school, she said the process for deciding whether a student qualified for extra services was hasty and flawed. For instance, invitation letters for parents to meetings about their child were generated the same day that some of the meetings were scheduled. “I’m listed as being part of the team, and I know I wasn’t attending the meetings,” she said.

One of Gibbons-Brown’s colleagues, who is also the mother of a student with disabilities, said she had no idea that compensatory services were available, even though she works in the district. The child, now 10, had not learned to read and exhibited serious behavioral issues that were exacerbated during the pandemic.

“I never heard about compensatory services,” said the teacher, who asked not to be identified to protect her child’s privacy.

She contacted a lawyer, who helped her enroll her child in an approved private school, a common alternative for students whose education plans cannot be fulfilled within the district.

Wakelin said that the law center’s goal is to compel district officials to focus on alternatives to private services, which are expensive and tend to favor parents who are savvy in navigating the system.

Meeting this mandate also falls disproportionately on some public schools. For instance, at Strawberry Mansion, a neighborhood school in impoverished North Philadelphia, 43% of its 250 students are classified as needing special education. The citywide figure is 19%.

Determining services for students is complex

Calculating what is owed to each student and then providing services is a daunting task, Gibbons-Brown said. Still, she said her school’s process didn’t consider what progress students might have made if not for the pandemic’s disruption.

If a student had not regressed beyond what they had scored pre-COVID, it was decided they didn’t need services, she said. But that doesn’t take into account any progress they should have made since.

“Analyzing the impact of COVID is more nuanced than that quick comparison,” she said. “I have students, based on one data point now and for 2019, that may look like there is no regression. Maybe not, but their progress has stalled.”

Wakelin said the process is “now in the do-over period and we’re trying to get the word out to families so they know that their children have this right.”

As complex as the task is, “it’s not like there aren’t other large urban districts that have grappled with this and come up with solutions compliant with the law,” she said.

Wakelin said the district still has not taken basic steps to reach families, saying “there’s nothing on the website, no fact sheets for parents, and minimal information provided to teachers.

“We want kids to get services, not just a ruling that this child is eligible for 50 hours they are not able to use.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

A unique Philadelphia school cultivates family members as staffers

2022-12-08T15:28:20+00:00

Kimberly Singleton was the parent of a student at Overbrook Educational Center in West Philadelphia when she lost her job at a billing company. Already an active volunteer at the school, she jumped at the chance when she saw an ad in the school newsletter for a classroom assistant.

Singleton got the job in February 2020 — an “interesting” time to start, she said, given the impending COVID pandemic — and when the school needed a substitute teacher, she suggested her daughter Kassidy apply. Now both of them work at the school, which Kassidy’s brother attended.

The Singletons are two of 11 staffers at the educational center with family ties to the school, where nearly a third of students are blind or visually impaired, according to its website. While other Philadelphia schools have family members working side by side, it’s “definitely unique” to have so many, district spokeswoman Marissa Orbanek said. And it’s not just a nice statistic. Principal Meredith Foote says the family culture, in which children see friends’ parents as teachers, staffers, and volunteers, “makes everything better.”

“When your child goes there or you’ve had a child go there, you treat everyone as if they were your child,” Foote told Chalkbeat. “It makes children want to come to school, and it makes adults want to be there for each other.”

“Family members want to come back, and we want to hire people who are invested in the children and in the community,” Foote told Chalkbeat.

The center started in the 1970s as a partnership with Overbrook School for the Blind, and has been accepting non-visually impaired students since the early 1990s, Foote said. The school accepts students via lottery, and there’s currently a waiting list, she said. The school boasts a high attendance rate, with 86% of students attending 95% or more school days, according to Foote.

The staffers said it’s the sense of family and community at the school, which has 278 students in grades K-8, that keeps them motivated. As a classroom assistant, Kimberly Singleton said, she encourages parents to stay involved.

“There’s a family atmosphere,” she said. “That’s what I always loved.”

A school’s welcoming policy for the community

School secretary Bonita Liles and her daughter, Love, are another mother-daughter pair at OEC.

Bonita Lyles was a secretary at a school in North Philadelphia when she started volunteering at OEC’s office. Lyles developed close relationships with school leaders and when the opportunity for a full-time position at the center came up, she applied and got the job.

Love Liles, a former OEC student herself, helps sixth to eighth graders with life skills as an aide, and is working toward her education degree. Love Liles is visually impaired herself, Foote said, so “they see someone they can look up to as a role model.” She said she plans to hire Love once she gets her degree.

“It’s wonderful working with her,” Bonita Liles said of her daughter. “I know where she is, and she knows where I am.”

Colleagues’ praise for Love Liles’ skills also brings her joy, she said. “I like hearing the positive feedback I get when they find out she’s my daughter,” she said. “She’s quiet with the kids, but stern. It warms my heart to know she’s thriving here.”

Love Liles said she appreciates the “small community” at OEC. “It’s a lot easier to get to know everyone,” she said. The atmosphere also fosters teamwork when there’s a big project coming up and helps with conflict resolution, she said.

“We’re really close with the community as well,” Bonita Liles said. Community connections “help the school a lot,” she said.

OEC climate staffer and parent Ellis Hamiel echoed that theme. “It’s almost like a small family,” he said. “We all work together to make sure the school’s running smoothly no matter what.”

Hamiel has three children at the school, and “they love it,” he said. One benefit of working at the school his children attend is that he can easily talk to teachers and keep up with lesson plans, he said.

Hamiel is active in Leaders of Tomorrow, one of several activities the school offers. He recruits male role models to come to the school and talk to boys about their experiences and how school helped them get where they are. His wife does the same for girls, he said.

“These people stay in contact with the kids,” Hamiel said. “That’s what’s keeping them focused on school. If they fail at something, we don’t turn our backs; we find ways to tutor them.”

The school has an “open-door” policy, and encourages family and community members to volunteer, Foote said. “If parents want to check in on their children, or a coach in the neighborhood wants to come in and help out, we do all of the volunteer paperwork necessary, but we’re encouraging as many extra hands as possible, because we always need help,” she said.

Meanwhile, students at the center get a kick out of seeing the mother-daughter Singleton duo at school, they said.

Kassidy said she’s asked questions like whether her mother did her hair that day. “I’m like, ‘No, I’m grown,’” she said. “I don’t think they understand: You still have parents when you’re grown.”

Philadelphia to offer in-person special education testing to 600 students

2021-01-15T00:22:45+00:00

The Philadelphia school district will open six high schools on Jan. 25 as regional centers for evaluating 600 high-needs special education students, Superintendent William Hite announced Thursday.

West Philadelphia High School, Edison High School, Martin Luther King High School, Strawberry Mansion High School, The Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush, and the High School for the Creative and Performing Arts will design new or updated individualized education programs. The district will help families with transportation to and from the centers, if necessary, and will offer meals at the sites.

The 600 students initially identified by the district are mostly those with complex needs and are a subset of the 21,000 district students with IEPs. They have disabilities that require some in-person therapy or interventions, said ShaVon Savage, the district’s deputy chief of specialized services.

For now, the centers will offer only special-education testing, not services. “It is our intent to open the centers for purposes of assessment first,” Savage said. “There is a strong possibility that we will be able to provide additional supports and services to special education students in these centers moving forward.”

Officials have identified students in this category who need evaluations or re-evaluations, and will begin notifying families Friday and next week starting Tuesday. (District offices will be closed Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.) Families will be able to opt out.

The long-term future of the centers depends partly on how quickly schools may open more widely for some in-person instruction. For now, Savage said, the plan is for the centers to stay open “indefinitely.”

Hite said that he would have more news within a week or two on any expansion of hybrid and in-person learning across the district.

Savage and the district’s student health medical officer, Dr. Barbara Klock, stressed that strict COVID-19 protocols will be in place at the regional centers.

“Health and safety practices are at the forefront of every decision we make,” Klock said. School staff will be tested weekly, Hite said, and students will be tested daily using a rapid test that provides results in 15 minutes.

No more than two adults will be in a room with a student, and all will be required to wear masks and observe 6-foot social distancing. In cases where that might not be possible, as in an evaluation for a student with physical disabilities, examiners will wear extra personal protective equipment, Klock said.

Savage noted that all-virtual learning has been going on in Philadelphia for much of a year, and said that this is the appropriate time to prepare for some in-person learning for students with complex needs.

“No one could have predicted that we would have stayed closed for this extended period of time,” she said. “We are now planning forward so that we can begin to really get into the depth of serving students in this new environment.”

Hite said that when more in-person learning resumes, it will start with prekindergarten through second graders. The next groups to go back would be all students with special needs from grades three through 12 and students in career and technical education fields that require certifications with equipment that’s only available in schools. “We will look at other groups after that,” he said.

Hite said that the schedule for a return to more in-person learning will not depend on the availability of COVID-19 vaccines for school workers. “Naturally we support expediting the vaccines so educators are receiving those, but the return is not conditioned on individuals receiving the vaccines.”

City health officials said earlier that vaccines might be available to school personnel as soon as later this month, but Hite and Klock said logistical details of who will be prioritized and the process of giving the vaccines were still being worked out.