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Audit: Are
special students
being helped?

The design of the special-needs
system is being examined by the
state Legislature

Legislature considers vouchers

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By Crystal Kua
Star-Bulletin

While state officials have been trying to comply with a federal court order to improve educational and mental health services to special-needs students, an audit says they may have lost sight of an important factor: Are these children being helped?

"I think in the haste to make things available, the system was not put together as carefully as it could have been," said Ira M. Schwartz, dean and director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Youth Policy.

As a result, the design of the system may have led to an escalation in cost, a concern that state lawmakers are examining as they prepare the state budget for the next two years.

"I think some of the cows are out of the barn. I'm not sure they can be put back very easily," Schwartz told state lawmakers yesterday.

But state officials said progress has been made in complying with the Felix consent decree and the way the system was set up has been dictated by federal law and the federal court.

State auditor Marion Higa, Schwartz and center co-director Richard Gelles briefed lawmakers on the content of an audit of the state's efforts to comply with the Felix consent decree, a federal court order aimed at improving educational and mental health services to the state's 11,000 special-needs students.

The audit, a follow-up to one issued in 1999, reconfirmed some of the problems that surfaced in the first report and it also found that keeping tabs on the cost and whether services are working remains a challenge for the state.

The audit's recommendations include:

The state Legislature should establish a "working definition" for service eligibility by statute.

The departments of education and health should adopt "best practices" in designing and funding programs.

The state should get an independent organization to evaluate services and programs and get a service voucher program set up.

"It's unclear whether the services provided are in fact appropriate or effective or the right match," Schwartz said.

State Schools Superintendent Paul LeMahieu told lawmakers the state has made progress in compliance. The state now has 17 school complexes -- high schools and schools that feed into them -- in compliance, whereas only a handful complied a year ago.

LeMahieu said that while some points in the audit were valid, there were some that were misapplied.

"I am fearful that an alliance distracted by the noise of negative rhetoric could come together and impair this final bit of our effort," LeMahieu said.

The state attorney general's office also said the state can't readily change definitions set out in federal law. "We are under a federal consent decree. The state has been held in contempt of court. To even attempt to change the definition ... would offend the (federal law)," Russell Suzuki said.

The authors of the audit stood by their findings and recommendations in the report. Schwartz acknowledged the "great progress" made by the state but said the job might have been made easier had the approach been more orderly, as in a business plan.

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