- D.C. summer-school enrollment fails to meet target
- Basis PCS runs afoul with the Charter Board over special education instruction [Basis PCS mentioned]
D.C. summer-school enrollment fails to meet target
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
July 28, 2013
The District’s school system failed to fill its summer-school seats for students in kindergarten through eighth grade this year after officials implemented a new invitation-only admissions policy that triggered criticism — and an injection of additional funds — from the D.C. Council.
The invitation-only policy, part of a broad overhaul of K-8 summer school, was meant to target lagging readers who school officials believed would benefit most from the five-week program. But it left out some of the students who are furthest behind.
As the end of the school year approached, school officials realized that invited students would not fill the 2,700 available slots. Officials then opened the program to all K-8 students and as of late June had filled 90 percent of seats, with hundreds more on wait lists. But many students did not show up, and as of late July, only 1,827 were enrolled.
School system officials said they do not believe the shortfall is related to the new admissions policy because every year, significant numbers of students enroll in summer school and then fail to show up.
“We do our best to factor that in, but it is not at all related to our enrollment policies or our approach to prioritizing the students who could best be served by our summer programs,” said spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz. “We enrolled every student that was interested in summer school.”
The school system’s K-8 program represents its central summertime effort to change the trajectory of low-performing elementary and middle school students, including more than 10,000 struggling readers.
Meanwhile, a summer program for rising freshmen — part of a broader effort to improve ninth-grade performance — enrolled 1,244 students. An additional 1,549 students are in high school summer programs, and 2,800 children attend publicly funded camps run by community-based organizations. Still other students are attending summer programs run by individual schools.
Research has shown that children tend to lose academic ground during the languid summer months. The problem is especially acute for poor children, who often have less access to out-of-school enrichment than their more affluent peers.
Although the District’s did not meet its enrollment target, the program — once totally disconnected from school-year academics — has made important strides, Salmanowitz said.
“For the first time this year, we have a summer-school curriculum that aligns to the work the students do during the school year and meets the specific needs of students,” Salmanowitz said. “Based on the success we’ve seen with that model, we will work aggressively to serve more students in summer school going forward.”
In addition to tying summer learning to school-year expectations, officials required this year’s summer-school teachers to be rated effective or highly effective in order to work.
“They were handpicked. That makes a huge difference,” said Gladys Hetherington, a teacher who is serving as the principal at Brookland Education Campus, one of eight sites for the K-8 program across the city.
See link above for full article.
Basis PCS runs afoul with the Charter Board over special education instruction [Basis PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
July 29, 2013
Olga Khazan, Washington Post, August 15, 2012:
"Basis D.C. was initially met with skepticism. When the school’s founders first applied, staff members and consultants for the D.C. Public Charter School Board worried that the school would not be able to meet the needs of 'low-performing, English-language learners and special education students.'"
It turns out the concerns expressed by the D.C. Public Charter School Board staff were warranted, at least in the area of special education. The PCSB has notified the administrators of Basis Public Charter School of five parent complaints during the school's first year of operation regarding special education services. The charges resulted in the PCSB performing an investigation which included a two day site visit. At the same time Basis PCS hired a company called End-To-End Solutions to develop a Special Education Action Plan. The deficiencies identified by End-To-End were also discovered by the PCSB during their time at the school. The PCSB lists them as:
1. Most of the documented IEPs, as well as accompanying notes and minutes that included decisions that altered the plan or established that the services were not needed, were either missing entirely from the students’ file folders or were not
signed by the parent and/or the school's administration,
2. The student files at the school and the files found in the EasyIEP/ Special Education Database System (SEDS) maintained by OSSE do not match. SEDS is the system of record for IEPs of students with disabilities, and it is state policy that all LEAs maintain in SEDS current and accurate records,
3. Lack of a tracking system (such as service delivery tracking or log system) for special education performance and related services, such as speech and language,
4. Students with disabilities were placed in a remedial classroom set up for students who are at risk of academic failure but not for students with disabilities (entitled the Targeted Intervention Program –TIP). These students did not appear to receive specialized instruction hours for reading prescribed in their IEPs,
5. There was no observable evidence of collaboration between the special education teacher and general education teachers,
6. Staff reported that the school had not by the time of PCSB’s visit provided adequate professional development on special education issues.
The PCSB has added three additional steps to the draft action plan submitted by Basis PCS. The Board is also requiring that the plan be finalized and implemented by August 12, 2013, and that the components of the plan be communicated to the parents of special education students. Furthermore, the Board is planning on scheduling four “check-in’s with Basis PCS throughout the upcoming school year, the first of which will be on-site.
The matter is up for discussion at tonight’s monthly PCSB meeting.