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Releases & Statements
Schools Pressured by the DOE to Keep Referral Rates Down
Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum today charged that the Department of Education’s reforms to special education have lead to a backlog of students awaiting evaluations and reeveluations and that the DOE is pressuring school superintendents to keep down referral rates for special education placements.
“Information obtained by my office indicates that there is a tremendous backlog of cases. Principals are complying with their superiors’ request to keep referrals down – they’re keeping referral letters in drawers and blaming untimely filing on data entry problems,” Gotbaum said.
Data from the Mayor’s preliminary management report shows reevaluations for special education decreased by nearly 50 percent over the past year, from 10,181 in the 2003 school year to 5,442 this year. Initial referrals also dropped to 5,370, from a five-year high of 8,203; the number of special education evaluations completed decreased to a five year low of 17,209, down from 27,075.
Gotbaum found that the backlog is the result of: (1) the abandonment of the district Committees on Special Education (CSE) in favor of consolidated regional CSEs, which reduced the number of committees from 37 to 10; (2) the transfer of the entire responsibility of special education referrals to school psychologists.
“The crisis in special education programs is another example of the DOE dismantling existing programs and putting in a new structure without adequate planning or analysis,” Gotbaum continued.
School psychologists, who spoke with the Public Advocate’s office on the condition of anonymity, said that consolidation has resulted in delays: where it used to take seven to ten days for a referral letter to reach them, it now takes over a month.
Training for school psychologists did not begin until schools opened in September, 2003, and school psychologists did not begin conducting evaluations until October. School psychologists also told the Public Advocate’s office that the DOE provided inadequate
training for them to carry out their new responsibilities, which now include conducting education evaluations and case management, tasks that used to be the responsibility of Special Education Evaluators. All 969 Special Education Evaluator positions were eliminated at the start of the school year.
Additionally, schools were given inconsistent directions on where the “clocking in” of referrals—the entry of referrals into a database—was to be done. They were first directed to send all referrals to the Regional Operating Centers, then to clock them in at the schools themselves, then again to send them to the Regional centers. Because DOE computers are not linked into a single network, this inconsistency led to confusing and inefficient record-keeping.
“This is the same type of mess that the DOE created when they unsuccessfully tried to reform the suspension policy, which also resulted in a backlog and chaos. They need to make reforms now to help special education students in all five boroughs,” concluded Gotbaum.
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