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State making headway,
but roadblocks still
impede Felix decree
compliance, report finds

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By Crystal Kua
Star-Bulletin

Bureaucratic, institutional and organizational barriers could thwart the state's progress toward complying with a federal consent decree aimed at improving educational services to special-needs children, a court-filed report says.

The status report by court-appointed monitor Ivor Groves is the first since the state was found in contempt of the Felix consent decree last year. It comes as lawmakers -- concerned about mounting costs -- heard yesterday about the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to meet the federal mandate.

The Department of Education told the Legislature's money committees that it will need $36 million to $41 million in emergency funding for the current year to meet court-mandated benchmarks, and more than $153 million in its budget over the next two fiscal years.

The Department of Health is asking for $63 million in emergency money and is projecting spending more than $235 million over the next two fiscal years.

A 1993 federal lawsuit filed by special-needs student Jennifer Felix led to the consent decree. Last year, U.S. District Judge David Ezra found the state in contempt for not complying with the consent decree by June 2000. The state now has till the end of this year to be in full compliance.

Groves also cites in his Dec. 13 status report the concern over the growing cost of providing educational services and the inability to accurately project the rise in costs.

But Groves also reports several indicators showing the state making significant progress toward compliance.

"Overall, the pace of change and improvement has increased during the first quarter of school year 2000-01," according to his report.

The hard work of those who made the improvements should be "acknowledged and celebrated," Groves said.

Even with the state's progress, Groves said there are at least three challenges:

Recruiting and retaining qualified teachers and aides remains a problem.

Attracting qualified staff to rural areas continues to be difficult.

Beefing up expertise among team members involved in setting educational plans for students needs to be done so that the most appropriate and cost-effective approaches are taken.

One factor that prevents the timely resolution of these deficiencies is the bureaucratic, institutional and organizational resistance to flexible problem-solving, he wrote.

"There are still delays in hiring and approving the necessary salary levels or other benefits that will make jobs in rural Hawaii sufficiently attractive," Groves wrote. "It is still difficult to remove persons who are not performing in their current positions either out of the work force or into more appropriately matched jobs."

Extraordinary powers given to state Schools Superintendent Paul LeMahieu and state Health Director Bruce Anderson to bypass rules, regulations and laws that impede progress should be used to break down these barriers, Groves said.

But that may not be easy: A lawsuit was recently filed alleging that LeMahieu overstepped this authority.

LeMahieu said he has had to be careful in the use of those powers, and while he believes there is a deep-seated institutional resistance to change, "No matter how much power you give the superintendent, the superintendent cannot say, ... 'OK, everybody stop being resistant now.'"

Money also is a factor. LeMahieu said the state won't be able to meet its court-imposed obligations if the money is not appropriated. "Without the money, there's no hope."

The next crucial deadline is June, when the state is supposed to have 24 school complexes -- high schools and the schools that feed into them -- in compliance and much of its system of care in place. Currently, 15 complexes are either in full or provisional compliance, LeMahieu said.

Deputy Attorney General Russell Suzuki said the consequences of noncompliance would be more costly. The federal court could appoint a master and take over the system for the state.

"The federal court through the master would basically have a blank check from the state to help to get compliant," Suzuki said.

The A+ after-school program or athletics could be cut to come up with money to fund obligations, he said.

"If that still doesn't satisfy the monitor, then they would have to face the possibility of having the system taken over and the court tapping the state treasury -- not just the department's budget -- in order to fund," Suzuki said.