L.A. Schools at Eye of Storm Over Special Education : Budget: District to examine why it sends 3,500 disabled or troubled students to private schools each year, costing taxpayers $60 million.

In desperately seeking ways to trim the Los Angeles Unified School District’s $4.3-billion budget, the Board of Education has stumbled into treacherous territory by asking why the district sends about 3,500 special education students to private schools, at a cost of $60 million a year.

On Monday, the board will initiate a review of whether it could save money by educating those students in the district’s own special education programs. The answer will probably be no, but the question itself throws attention on a startling statistic:

Los Angeles Unified makes more than a third of the state’s private special education placements, although it is home to only 11% of the state’s special education students.

That record puts the district in the eye of a brewing statewide storm over the rising cost of special education, a controversy that may lead the Legislature to restrict the amount schools can spend on special ed, including the expensive private school placements.

The most cynical point of view--one first voiced by the state legislative analyst two years ago--is that large, cash-strapped districts such as Los Angeles are dumping the hard-to-handle, expensive-to-educate students because the state will pick up 70% of the cost of sending them to private schools.

And parents of disabled children--their awareness heightened by advocacy groups--have become more likely to push for the placements.

But intertwined with those explanations is a numbing observation: Societal problems festering in urban areas have bloated the numbers of seriously emotionally and psychologically disturbed children, the very ones most likely to need the extra attention and isolation of private special education schools.

“Growing numbers cannot be contained on a regular campus, because of the bizarre nature of their behavior--they’re psychotic and they do the most outrageous things that can be imagined,” said Richard Schnetzer, legislative representative for the California Assn. of Private Specialized Education and Services. “Non-public schools have served as a safety valve for the system.”

They are students such as Tony, who threw a chair across his fourth-grade classroom. Although he had been struggling with concentration and behavioral problems for years, his mother traces his more violent outbursts to her then-pending divorce.

“I think a great deal of it had to do with an unsettled life,” she said. “His father and I separated for the first time in 1985, for the third time in 1989. It was a lot of turmoil for him.”

Ultimately, Los Angeles Unified sent Tony to a private school called Wilshire West and, at 15, he is beginning to take some classes at Venice High in hopes that next fall he can become one of the few private school placements to transfer back to public school.

In an acknowledgment of the growing demand for specialized student services--ranging from hourlong tutorials to 24-hour residential care--one of the highest-growth items in the proposed state budget is special education.

To counter that growth--and the political resistance to rising costs--the state Department of Education plans to propose to the Legislature in July a new funding formula that would essentially cap private-school support.

“We’re trying to stem the flow of money over the dam,” said Sally Hinton, a state special education consultant.

Statewide, the numbers of students identified as needing special education services grew 17% in the past four years, to more than 550,000 last year. In that same period, there was a 43% increase--to 9,700--in private-school placements.

School officials usually refer for private-school placement children who have been difficult to manage in special education programs in public schools.

The private placements are costly. They average $19,000 a year, but range as high as $200,000 annually for the few students sent to live-in treatment programs out of state. Districts are responsible for less than a third of that private school cost.

But Bill Rivera, spokesman for Los Angeles Unified Supt. Sid Thompson, said the district does not send its handicapped students to private schools to save money. It would be cheaper to provide the services on district campuses, he said, but Los Angeles Unified has too many seriously troubled students and too few qualified teachers to accommodate all the needs.

The private schools offer a personalized setting not now available in most public school districts--tiny classes, full-time counseling staffs and numerous tutors. Each tends to specialize in a category of disability--emotional disorders, for instance, or hearing impairment--and can therefore more closely tailor the staff and the program to the students’ needs.

“We have four full-time therapists,” said Mark Mitock, executive director of Wilshire West. “They just don’t see somebody when they’re angry--their whole job is to try to foster appropriate behavior in the classroom, at home and in the outside world.”

Increasingly, the private schools are encountering students who do not fit the common perception of special education candidates as mentally retarded, hearing impaired, physically disabled, autistic or dyslexic.

Instead, these students are scarred by outside sources--ranging from a mother’s drug use to exposure to gang violence--that have caused or exacerbated their inability to learn such basics as reading and writing.

For them, private schools are “a very important option . . . often one that may make the difference between ensuring that a child grows up as a responsible adult or enters the criminal justice system,” said Robert Myers, a private attorney whose firm has handled numerous lawsuits against the district on behalf of parents seeking private placements.

But state officials say it is possible for public schools to build programs that accommodate those students, according to preliminary results of a five-year pilot project in 15 districts around the state.

“Yes, more and more of these are extreme (severely emotionally disturbed) kids--the world is getting uglier,” said Joseph P. Barankin, a state special education financial adviser. “But if indeed the world is getting uglier, then public schools need to shift with those needs.”

Parents of some children in private-school placements say they would welcome a return to public schools, if equal services could be provided.

Maria Austin’s daughter began attending a Los Angeles Unified special education class last June, but only after six years of individualized attention in a private school where her myriad neurological problems were diagnosed and addressed.

“If the school systems were providing a quality education, I think most parents would probably have their child in their home school instead of having to search for an alternative,” Austin said.

“But I don’t think (the public schools) will ever be able to handle it all, unless they throw the whole system out and start over again.”