Probe Assails Remedial Aid to Parochial Schools

The San Diego Unified School District is violating federal law by failing to provide low-income private school students with the same remedial education it offers its own students, state investigators have concluded.

The state Department of Education, in a March 26 report, gave school officials until April 25 to show how they will serve all 1,243 private school students entitled to the remedial help in classrooms as conducive to learning as public school classrooms.

The school district could ultimately lose about $10 million in federal funds it receives for the program if it does not correct the situation, said Hanna Walker, manager of the Education Department’s Office of Compensatory Education. But the state has made no threat of a sanction at this time, she said.

The Rev. Dennis Clark, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of San Diego, called the report vindication for private school students and officials, and said that the federal government should take the program away from the school district and turn it over to a private group.

“I am convinced at this time that the district is not able or willing to mount a program that will provide equity,” said Clark, who sparked the state inquiry by filing a complaint in February.

Noble Shade, the school district’s director of the remedial program, disagreed with most of the investigators’ conclusions, but said the district would attempt to comply with the orders.

“We won’t be able to do all those things, but we’ll try to do as much as we can. And if we can’t do them by the 25th, we’ll indicate how quickly we can have them in place,” Shade said.

Meanwhile, the school district faces more trouble from U.S. Department of Education investigators who were scheduled to begin a review of the situation here this morning. The federal government could ultimately take the remedial education program away from the district if it concludes that equal services are not being offered to students in the private schools.

The federal investigation is the first conducted anywhere in the country.

The school district’s headaches stem from a protracted dispute with Catholic school officials, who operate 12 of the 15 San Diego sectarian schools where certain low-income students are entitled to remedial reading and math lessons.

Federal law requires public school districts to offer the remedial help, but a 1985 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court prohibits public school teachers from entering the premises of private schools to do so. The court reasoned that the practice entangled the government in religious matters.

San Diego school officials last fall decided to teach private school students in school buses converted into small classrooms. The buses are parked just outside the private schools, and students board them to take their lessons. Across the country, other public school districts have chosen similar alternatives.

But the Catholic Diocese of San Diego complained to the state in February that most of its students were receiving no instruction at all and that the converted school buses were inadequate as classrooms. The California Catholic Conference voiced the same concerns to the federal government.

State investigators agreed that “all eligible students are not being served at the sites where the classrooms are now placed.” Today, more than seven months after the school year began, the school district is providing school bus classrooms at only six of the 15 schools, Shade said.

The state also found that the converted buses are cramped, noisy and insufficiently ventilated; subject to interruptions by passers-by; in need of more storage space, and tilted toward the curb where they are parked at one of the schools.

It also concluded that the school district was late in providing textbooks and diagnostic test materials to Catholic schools. It ordered those defects and others remedied.

Shade contended, however, that the buses have adequate ventilation and actually are more spacious than some public school classrooms where the remedial lessons are taught. Noisy generators are being fixed or, in one case, replaced, he said. The district is working on a plan to store materials in the Catholic schools.

He said the bus outside Our Lady’s parochial school tilts because the school’s principal ordered it parked at a certain spot where the street is sloped.

District officials note that the diocese rejected their offers to teach parochial school students at public schools during the school day, after school, on Saturdays and during the summer.

“We haven’t had time to get the whole program in place,” Shade said. “It would be better for them to wait until we get the whole program in place and then do an evaluation of it.”