Florida's charter schools are excluding our disabled children

From Scathing Purple Musings

by Bob Sykes

From reporters John O’Connor and Sarah Gonzalez of NPR:

According to state law, every student is supposed to have an equal shot at enrollment – including students with disabilities. But students with severe disabilities are not appearing in most charter school classrooms.

StateImpact Florida and The Miami Herald gathered and analyzed data on K-12 students with disabilities from 14 school districts representing more than three-quarters of Florida’s total charter enrollment.

The analysis focused on students in the state’s two most severe disability categories, which includes some students with autism, Down Syndrome, and cerebral palsy. It shows:

More than 86 percent of the charter schools do not serve a single child with a severe disability — compared to more than half of district schools which do.

In Duval County, just one student enrolled in a charter school has a severe disability. Duval district schools educate more than 1,000 severely-disabled students.

There’s not a single child with a severe disability in charter schools in Pinellas County, the nation’s 24th-largest school district.

The majority of charter school students with severe disabilities are concentrated in a handful of schools that specialize in those disabilities, often autism.

The Florida Department of Education, citing privacy concerns, declined to provide statewide data of students with severe disabilities. But the agency said their analysis shows 86 percent of charter schools statewide had no students with severe disabilities.

It’s a trend repeated in California, Louisiana, New York and Texas, according to researchers from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A Gates study finding? Hmmmm.

I want to focus on a part of the story that me be misleading. Beyond the data above the reporters – which includes the Miami Herald’s Kathleen McGrory and Scott Hiassen – wrote about IEPs. Its important for readers to now that IEP’s are not just limited to kids with profound disabilities as cerebral palsy and autism. Many students have IEPs with simple learning disabilities and have accommodations more subtle – such as testing in another room, having tests read to them or being provided alternate assessments. Some are even behavioral as being allowed “reasonable” movement around the classroom.

The reason this is important is that it illustrates the lengths that our public schools are already going to serve these students. Public schools have ESE staffing specialists while charter schools have marketing and PR people. The former does a remarkable job of caring unconditionally for all their students while the later keeps some of them at arm’s length all the while advancing an image of virtue and superiority.

http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/florida-charter-schools-failing-disbaled-children/