School Board hears corrective actions on special education audit.

Parents not assuaged. Still kind of pissed.

[Note: I find many things about special education in the United States and in the district very confusing. I hope to write in more depth about this in the future. If you have some insight—you’re a teacher, parent, or someone else—and would like to talk to me, please send me an email at ben@wauwastoa.com]

All the way back in February, southeastern Wisconsin’s Cooperative Educational Service Agency (CESA)¹ completed an audit on the Wauwatosa School District’s special education program based on an analysis of administrative data, focus groups with parents and educators, and surveys completed between mid-December of 2021 to mid-February in 2022. The audit results were presented to the school board on April 11, 2022.

On Monday, November 14, the school district’s Director of Special Education Stacey Klemm and Chief of Pupil and Family Supports Luke Pinion followed-up on some of the actions they’ve taken since the audit was presented eight months ago.

I am going to bounce back-and-forth between the February audit, the April presentation, and the November follow-up although I’ve tried to make it relatively clear where I’m quoting from.

I. MLSS

Teachers and parents in focus groups for the audit described a system where staffing was inadequate, employees could not be retained, and compensation was low. Specialists were not doing the specialized things they were trained for but being pulled in a dozen directions at once. Many “felt that there was a need for clearly defined roles and responsibilities.”

They expressed frustration that services and infrastructure were available in some buildings but not others. For instance, some schools had mental health workers while others did not. Some had a well-executed process for addressing concerns and allocating resources but some did not.

Teachers felt isolated and unable to communicate lessons learned or best practices to other schools in the district. They felt that professional development was nonexistent or ineffective. That administrators were reactionary, that new initiatives or changes to procedures and processes were poorly-executed, half-hearted, and just as quickly implemented as replaced by something equally poorly-executed and half-hearted.

The original audit from February made forty-six recommendations that mostly seemed to revolve around adding staff, communicating better with parents and teachers, allocating resources more effectively, creating processes to improve collaboration, and improving what they called “service delivery models” but which mostly seemed to involve adjustments to curriculum, scheduling, and staffing.

The report recommended some relatively straightforward changes like, “create opportunities for parents to be trained and serve on district decision making teams to engage a more diverse representation of district families,” “assign a school psychologist to two buildings with balanced student enrollment,” and have no more than “500-700 students per psychologist.”

Other recommendations were more inscrutable. Sometimes they were very vague, like when the auditor suggested the district “create Building level problem solving Teams to plan for individual student needs.”

Sometimes they included jargon that was hard to parse. Like the suggestion to “align this process with an equitable Multi Level System of Support for academics and behaviors.”

Multi Level System of Support, or MLSS, came up a lot. It was mentioned nine times during the April school board meeting. It was mentioned thirty-one times on Monday. There was even a slide to explain it:

I would note that the image looks like a top-down view of a toilet flushing or a bunch of positive-seeming but somewhat vague concepts slowly circling a drain labeled “Equity.” But I think this was unintentional.

It was hard for me to visualize what this meant. The explanation from Ms. Klemm wasn’t too helpful either, because it mostly just repeated what was on the slide:

When we think of multi-level systems of support, we're talking about: Do we have a culture that all all children belong in? Do we have shared leadership? Do we have structures and systems in place to implement things? Do we have evidence-based practices and are we using them as a continuum of supports to meet the new needs of students? And do we have collaboration structures and strategies to use data and high quality instruction when we have all of those coming together?

That is what a multi-level system of support is.

Nor was a more concise explanation from Superintendent Demond Means later in the meeting:

The quick and dirty response or description of MLSS is there should be some type of structure that each school can gather around and look at both the social emotional and academic progress of a child. There should be a a structure that is helping that process.

I tried to look up some information on this from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Not much better:

Schools and districts can better meet the needs of every learner when policies, programs, practices, roles, and expertise are aligned and coordinated into an interdependent whole. The systems approach of an equitable multi-level system of supports enables schools and districts to proactively provide the most effective instruction and supports to learners. In this way, systemic implementation helps ensure all learners benefit equitably from access, opportunity, and support across the school and district.

I feel like they’re just describing an effective organization as opposed to an ineffective one?

Fortunately, Board Member Leigh Anne Fraley offered an analogy that was so clear, so compelling, so concrete that of course none of the district administrators would have used it. She compared it to a hospital.

MLSS means nothing to most people, and so one of the things that I'm hoping […] is—Can we create a narrative that people can understand? Like when you go to the the hospital there's an MLS system, right? You've got your primary care, you've got your specialist, you've got your nurses on the floor, you've got the medical assistant that comes in and takes your blood, etc.

Everybody has a role and they all have to be working together but there has to be a system.

This made sense to me, and I immediately began replacing all the components she mentioned with their school-based analogs.

These students—and I’m referring to all of them now, not just special education students—they come through the door of the school, and they have a problem: they’re uneducated. They need tests and diagnostics to figure out why and in what ways, teachers to equip them with the right thoughts, psychologists and mental health experts to repair them when they break down and mold them into a form ready to receive those right thoughts, coaches to help them “blow off steam,” some kind of record or maintenance history that anyone can pull up at a moment’s notice to figure out what’s been done and what hasn’t been tried yet.

Cynical people often liken modern public education to a factory—stamping out hundreds or thousands of identical widgets each year. But this actually seems much different. I mean, there’s still something of the human-as-machine quality to it. Like a ship after it’s built and launched. Once at sea, it is supported by dedicated staff who tinker and are attuned to it’s every hiss and whimper. They fly in experts when the problems appear intractable. They upgrade components, needlegun the rust, and pull into port when it’s low on food. They do what’s necessary to coax out every last bit of performance and effectiveness. Because it’s a very expensive capital investment.

Maybe I am being too cynical? Most people don’t consider hospitals inhuman (well, I don’t know). But I do notice other analogies that didn’t get used. The student’s mind is not a garden, for instance. Their education is not a journey to the top of a mountain. It is not Aristotle’s Lyceum. I’m not saying any of these visions are necessarily better necessarily, but it does seem important to wonder why certain ones come to mind more easily than others.

II. Upset Parents

Overall, if I’m counting correctly, the school district has hired or will hire about sixteen new staff at least partly in response to the recommendations of the February audit. These have included:

• Chief of Pupil and Family Supports,

• Director of Student Success,

• Director of Special Education (new person, not new position),

• Director of Equity and Inclusion,

• Director of Data and Analytics

• 4 “Mental Health Specialist” positions,

• 5 “Social Emotional Specialists” positions,

• 1 special education coordinator, and

• 1 (or more) school psychologists

One parent after the presentation said that while she was grateful that the district had finally developed a plan, she thinks the staff additions are “a little top heavy,” and would have liked to see more front-line staff that actually interact daily with kids.

Another frequent source of discord involved communication between parents and district staff. Parents felt uninformed, intentionally kept in the dark, and dismissed. The audit relayed concerns from parents about a lack of transparency “when an issue or crisis arose in the classrooms” and complaints that, instead of handling the problems themselves, “staff encouraged parents to go to administration with their concerns.”

There was a perception that inside knowledge or connections were required to get the services and support parents and their kids were legally entitled to and that “they only found out about options for their students through word of mouth” because “the range of services or supports were not communicated upfront.”

But my sense is that the audit report failed to convey the actual depths of dissatisfaction here.

One mother during the school board meeting in April [emphasis mine]:

We expected all of you to be taking responsibility that our kids would have the proper teachers supports and resources to ensure they could succeed. As this audit reports, you did not take that responsibility seriously. We—parents—have had to fight against a system of neglect. We’ve had to beg for resources and fight for our kids rights.

She cited instances during the pandemic when the district did not provide services as legally required by their child’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) or “when the busing contractor would leave our children waiting for hours to be picked up or dropped off from school.”

Two parents during the meeting in April talked about pulling their kids out of the district entirely to get them the help they needed.

One mother said, “I am terrified to send my son into your buildings.”

Superintendent Means did push back slightly on the audit’s findings by pointing out that there is engagement with special education families, that there are parent groups that meet with the Director of Special Education, and that “we have that group in place right now.”

But then he admitted that many families dislike it and that “maybe the construction of how the group engages has not been pleasing to a certain segment of that population.”

This also seemed like a bit of an understatement. One mother described these parent engagement groups not as displeasing but as “really toxic right now” to the point where “there's many of us that don't feel heard or welcome to some of the different meetings.”

The mother who eventually removed her child from the school district to provide better care said the parent committee was simply a twice-yearly presentation. “It was not a committee, it was not feedback, it was not input from the parents.”

Another mother:

I've heard also that staff and teachers are having a hard time doing their job because of the requests and the demands of some of the parents. It's after just what appears like complete neglect that we're frustrated, we're frightened, we want the best for our children, and I feel like I was admonished for caring that much.

III. Quick Wins

Human rights are interesting. The Declaration of Independence says we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Bill of Rights gives us the freedom of speech. And assembly. And several other things. More recently, in places like the UN Declaration of Human Rights, I learn that we also apparently have the right to things like “leisure” and “periodic holidays with pay.” And it’s not uncommon in news articles and political platforms to talk about a “right to a living wage” and a right to work. Wait, no, I think that last one is considered bad and terrible.

One way to think about rights is as something core to to our status as humans, inalienable. To deny rights is in some way to deny a human their dignity. But I prefer to think of rights in terms of their transaction costs—how much it takes to enforce them or to change them. The right to life—to self-defense—is pretty straightforward. You’re always around to defend it and it can be as simple (though not easy) as throwing a fist or fending off an attacker.

But it can get trickier. And more costly. It is much easier and less costly to defend your right to life than to defend someone else’s right to life. The right to free speech is pretty cheap too. The government doesn’t have to expend lots of resources to facilitate it, it just has to not spend resources trying to quash it. But what about the right to leisure? If I take the day off but didn’t get to spend it leisurely, can I take another one? If I have the right to a living wage who will pay it? What if he or she doesn’t have the money? What if she has the money but wants to keep it? Doesn’t she have the right to do with her property what she will?

Saying, “You have a right to X” is pretty easy. Paying for it is another matter.

The federal government passed the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) in 1975. It promised, among other things, a right to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) for children with disabilities.

But it’s not actually free, and the federal government has never seemed particularly eager to pick up the tab. So many decades later, providing a free and appropriate education for children with disabilities costs tens of billions of dollars a year, and the federal government pays for about 12% of it. The state of Wisconsin usually pays another 25-30% but mostly the local school district is on the hook for any costs beyond that. For Wauwatosa in the 2021-2022 school year, that was a little over $8 million.

This puts local school districts in a difficult situation, and I think this partially explains their behavior. They have a resource—money—that is scarce and a potentially unlimited claim—special education costs—on those resources. They can’t legally refuse to spend a potentially unlimited amount of money but neither do they actually have an unlimited amount of money.

One way to avoid this is to create barriers that only some people will be able to surmount. You can add paperwork, create elaborate processes and procedures, and just generally create burdensome requirements that most people won’t bother to meet because it’s too confusing. One mother mentioned that “not every parent walks around with a binder full of every District policy […] tabbed and marked up,” like she does.

You also might just not be completely forthright and transparent about what’s available. If everyone knew what they were entitled to, they might start asking for it. Which could get expensive.

You might also try to prevent, or at least not encourage, the people who knew what they were entitled to from communicating and coordinating with those who do not.

I don’t think this is a complete explanation, but I do think it is a plausible and partial explanation of the following exchange that took place over eight months:

Board Member Leigh Anne Fraley in April wanted to know from the auditor whether there were “quick wins. Things that are—things that you think we could do quickly, somewhat easily […] What can we do in the next two months?”

A mother during the public comment period after the board’s discussion offered one suggestion: an advisory committee composed of parents, teachers, and staff so that parents could feel included and have input into the policies for special education students. She had struggled to get this off the ground for years and did not feel that she had received a lot of support:

The seven of you [and our former superintendent] have failed the special education community. […] You have. How many people need to come to the microphone? How many years must we wait? Is it so hard to develop a committee to collaborate and start to look at issues […] We can't wait till September—what's listed on the board agenda—we can't wait until October.

Unfortunately, this same mother appeared eight months later on Monday to complain that, despite a request for quick wins, this still had not been done:

We are offered a free resource to develop an Advisory Group. Somebody that's done this in other districts. Let's get this up and going. I'm really concerned with what I see where it says “consider an advisory committee.”

I've come to this board—Leigh Anne two years ago, it's coming on two years. You and I spoke. I told you all the districts that are doing things. You told me we would get something going.

[Board Member] Sharon [Muehlfeld], you sent me a huge document asking me, “Deb, can you review this on family engagement?” I had parents saying, “Don't do it. This board won't act.” I did it, right Sharon? I reviewed that, I gave you feedback back so you guys can act.

[…]

You gave a number of accolades to the city's disability commission. Clearly you like what they're helping with, so why can't we have our own School District disability advisory committee?

1. From their website:

Cooperative Educational Service Agencies (CESAs) were created by the Wisconsin legislature more than 50 years ago to serve as a link between school districts and between school districts and the state. There are twelve CESAs across the state. 

Located in Southeastern Wisconsin, CESA #1 is governed by an 11 member Board of Control, comprised of elected school board members from the six county region. In addition, the Agency receives guidance from its Professional Advisory Committee, which is open to the superintendents from all 45 member districts.