L.A. School Board Gets Plan to Re-Integrate Disabled Students

A year after agreeing to overhaul its special education program to settle a class-action lawsuit, the Los Angeles Unified School District on Monday received the first proposals for change.

Although it is preliminary and subject to modification after a Jan. 21 public hearing, the report documents the extent to which its 69,000 disabled students are segregated.

A committee including administrators, community members and parents found that the district teaches about 40% of the students with physical or emotional disabilities in separate classes either at regular campuses or in special education schools.

That exceeds by more than 5,000 the number eligible for state funding. The committee report recommends reducing the total by re-integrating 1,000 students a year into mainstream classrooms--one of the proposals that could come before the board for a vote in several months.

In addition, a growing number of disabled students are being sent to specialized private schools at public expense because the district cannot meet their needs. Last year, the district spent $68.2 million on nonpublic schools for more than 3,500 students, the report said, and was reimbursed by the state for all but $16.6 million.

“We’ve got to provide those services ourselves,” said board member George Kiriyama. “I cannot see spending that kind of money.”

The district has pledged to revamp its special education system over the coming four years in ways as fundamental as creating a better computer system to track students and as controversial as figuring out how to include more disabled students in regular classrooms.

Board members last December acknowledged that the district’s handling of disabled students violated state and federal laws--for instance, by not evaluating them quickly enough--and agreed to settle the 1993 class-action suit first filed on behalf of a learning-disabled student who twice failed 10th grade. The Chanda Smith Consent Decree, named for that student, was signed by a federal court judge in April.

Much of the debate at the school board meeting Monday focused on a new mission statement for the district, produced after months of discussion by one of the 14 special education subcommittees.

The statement pledges that the district “will effectively educate all students . . . regardless of their diverse needs.” It also lists remedies such as promoting respect and supporting parent participation.

Board President Jeff Horton said he was encouraged by the statement’s inclusion of all students, not just the disabled. But several board members said it was vague and obvious.

Member Julie Korenstein questioned the proposed expenditure of $81,000 to publicize the mission statement throughout the district, using everything from ads on the district’s television station to staff training workshops.

Former teachers union President Helen Bernstein, who recently took the post of Mayor Richard Riordan’s first education advisor, was even more critical.

“Talk about a waste of public funds,” Bernstein said after the meeting. “You can come up with a mission statement in three minutes but, more importantly, nobody reads mission statements.”