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[Tripon]

California Department of Education said last week that it will comply with a federal court order to improve significantly its system for monitoring special education, after years of legal maneuvering to block the changes.

The department said it would end its legal challenges and follow a “corrective action plan” for special education monitoring issued in 2014 by the U.S. District Court of Northern California in San Francisco. On March 9, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a mandate upholding its December decision that the state must comply with the district court order to follow the corrective action plan. The department had sought a rehearing, after losing its appeal to overturn the order. Legal recourse would be an appeal to the high court, which the department said it had rejected.

“The corrective action plan requires reforms to the design of CDE’s state-level monitoring system that will benefit all concerned about CDE’s responsibilities to monitor and enforce special education laws,” said Larisa Cummings, a staff attorney at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund who is representing the plaintiffs in the Emma C. lawsuit.

The corrective action plan emerged from a long running 2003 consent decree that settled the Emma C. lawsuit and continues to govern special education services in East Palo Alto’s K-8 Ravenswood City School District. The lawsuit, brought by eight students in the Ravenswood district, alleged erratic or nonexistent special education services in the district, as well as poor oversight by the California Department of Education.

Under the terms of the consent decree, the California Department of Education agreed to monitor improvements in special education in Ravenswood in areas including staff training, student assessments, the creation of individualized education plans and the integration of students with disabilities into general classrooms.

Why this will apply to the entire state instead of one school district.

The judges – Chief Judge Sidney Thomas and Judges Michelle Friedland Alex Kozinski – quickly got to the heart of the state’s approach to monitoring special education.

Friedland asked Koski: “Am I understanding that basically it’s the state who said if you’re challenging Ravenswood’s monitoring, you’re really challenging the whole state because it’s a uniform system? Is it the state that said we just have one system so it is the whole state?”

Koski: “The state has offered only one system, so that’s exactly right.”

https://edsource.org/2017/two-decad...-nears-resolution-brings-major-changes/576675

What this ultimately mean is that more school funding will head to Special Education, but possibly at the expense to the larger school population unless the state devotes more funding overall to education, which I doubt will happen.