Education for the Disabled Faces Reform : Schools: L.A. Unified board approves a suit settlement to avert a long court fight. But how the district will achieve better integration and tracking of special students remains unknown.

The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education agreed Monday to overhaul its special education system by approving a legal settlement intended to avert a lengthy court battle.

The tentative accord in a 1993 class-action lawsuit calls for major reforms in the system that seeks to educate 65,000 disabled students, including integrating more of them with their non-disabled peers and creating a computer system to track the academic progress of all students.

An outside consultants’ study, completed as part of the settlement agreement, found that the district ran a separate and unequal system for disabled students, in direct violation of state and federal laws.

“We should not have slipped like this, but we did and we’re going to change it,” said Supt. Sid Thompson, shortly after the board approved the federal consent decree on a 5-1 vote in closed session.

An attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which was co-counsel in the class-action suit, said the settlement should serve as both a model and a warning for other, smaller school districts.

“We picked this district . . . to send a message to smaller districts that their time will come, too,” said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California.

How the changes will occur in Los Angeles Unified and what they will cost could remain the largest questions after public hearings planned for the end of January.

Board President Mark Slavkin portrayed the open-ended nature of the agreement as its greatest strength, affording the district greater flexibility than it might have encountered at the losing end of a lawsuit.

But others, including the two board members who did not support the agreement, said its vagueness could lead to the decree’s--or the district’s--downfall.

“I do not know how much this consent decree will cost,” said board member Julie Korenstein, who abstained from the vote. “I asked this morning how much a computer system will cost and [district] staff didn’t know. That’s a problem.”

Korenstein pointed out that the district already has spent $45 million to upgrade its computer system, which is still only partially functional.

Board member David Tokofsky, who voted against the agreement, and teachers union President Helen Bernstein expressed concern about how the reforms would affect students not enrolled in special education programs.

Aside from the computer system and mainstreaming measures, the consent decree calls for addressing rampant disorganization found by the consultants by hiring an assistant superintendent to oversee special education.

But the restructuring will not help the student whose plight led to the class action lawsuit. Chanda Smith, now 19, attends a Cypress private school at public expense and will graduate in the spring. She hopes to attend community college and become an attorney.

Her mother, Eliza Thompson, told the board Monday that she was “proud to have been part of this case.”

For Thompson, it was a personal quest to stop the torture of perpetual failure for her daughter, who was 17 when the case was filed and could barely read or write.

“She had nightmares about not being able to read the labels on cans or medicine bottles, that she would not be able to succeed in life,” Thompson recalled. “I could tell at times she wanted to totally give up.”

The original lawsuit, which was amended several times, focused on the district’s poor record-keeping. That was because Smith’s learning struggles had been labeled a disability in sixth grade but, after she changed schools several times, those records seemed permanently lost.

Instead of receiving tutorials or special instruction, Smith was put in regular classes. She failed 10th grade twice at Manual Arts High School before being moved into a job-experience program that expected her to look for part-time work, even though she could not fill out an application.

Only after the lawsuit was filed, in November 1993, did the district move Smith to Alton School in Cypress.