Chicago Schools Agree to Hire 350 Specialists for Handicapped

The city will hire 350 specialists to teach handicapped students in a plan that settles a four-year dispute between the school board and the U.S. Education Department, it was announced Friday.

“This settlement brings to an end what can only be described as the shameful and disgraceful mistreatment of those children who are most vulnerable and in need of special care,” James W. Compton, president of the Chicago Board of Education, said at a news conference.

The plan calls for the board to shift money and employees from central and district offices to local schools, said Compton, who was appointed in a school board shake-up when Mayor Richard M. Daley took office. The plan also creates a new post, interim associate superintendent, to oversee the services to handicapped students.

In the course of the dispute, the school board was threatened with the loss of more than $100 million in annual federal aid and $4 million in funds for magnet schools, which have smaller, more intensive classes.

The school board allocated $4.4 million of its $365.9-million special education budget for the settlement, officials said.

Donald Moore, executive director of Designs for Change, a Chicago child-advocacy organization, called the plan one of the most significant settlements of its kind in a decade.

“We think it is excellent,” he said. “It is cutting a lot of central office positions and putting that money in the local schools where it is needed.”

The dispute arose in 1984, when the federal agency investigated the delivery of services to handicapped students by the Chicago Public Schools.

School System Probed

The 15-month probe found that the school system, by failing to evaluate and place handicapped children promptly, was in violation of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

The law requires that students believed to have mental, emotional or physical disabilities be tested and evaluated within 60 days and, if warranted, placed in special education programs.

About 3,500 Chicago students have not been evaluated--a backlog dating to 1983, school officials said Friday. There are about 41,000 handicapped students in the system.