23 March 2023 PAUSD Board Meeting Comments

Playground Equipment

Thank you for the work to improve the accessibility of playground equipment at our schools. As a special education parent, it is great to see the playgrounds being updated both for our kids and everyone. School playgrounds are particularly important for some special education families as they are actually contained unlike many of our public parks and thus safer for children at play outside of school hours. Could you share the current progress and schedule for upgrading all of the schools?

Transportation Plan

Could you please share the number of students with IEPs that use transportation services, how many of them are using it to go to a school that is not their local school, and the budget for that portion of the program and whether those funds come out of the federal and state special education funds?

Promise Report

On Equity, my general education daughter is at JLS and she shared with me that the special education students sit at a separate table at lunch and that no one ever talks to them or even knows that there are special education students at JLS. Separate classrooms, separate tables at lunch, it isn’t special education, it is segregated education.

In the full report on page 47 the District talks about “consolidation” of special education services. 10.2% of students have IEPs. That means EVERY teacher is a special education teacher and should qualified as such. Best practices around the US are moving away from segregated special education. As I noted in my report to the district at the last meeting, Palo Alto is far from a leader in inclusion with many States doing better on average than our district. By virtually every metric, our special education students are falling farther behind their general education peers here in Palo Alto.

Mental Health and Wellness

1. There is no data on the number of students referred based on whether they have an IEP or 504 plan as well as ethnic group information. These may be significant factors in referrals as 46.75% of PAUSD suspensions are students with disabilities.

2. This is the second district that I have seen “Tier 3” support discussed as an afterthought. These are the students most in need and for whom the consequences of failures are highest. Also, there is no breakdown of the number of students in Tiers 1, 2 and 3. Could the district please report on wait times and other metrics by school. That most of the middle school wait listed students are at JLS deserves more visibility.

Staffing

1. Where is data on the number of disabled employees? There are 61 million disabled Americans (around 20% of the population) and they face huge discrimination in the workforce. There is an employment gap of almost 40% between disabled and non-disabled people.

2. The overall annual churn rate of 10.2 percent should be highlighted and discussed. Is this new staff leaving quickly or are we losing long term employees. No data is provided on the number of vacancies or the average time to fill them – and what are the long vacant positions.

3. Special education staffing is highlighted as a concern, but no data is provided on either certificated or classified churn rates.

Ad Hoc Committee – Elementary Behavioral Supports

1. It is disturbing that someone is called out as an official “CAC representative”. As far as I know, the Palo Alto CAC has no official status with the school district and is a small grass roots parents group. There is no other grass roots parents group that is treated anything like this. In this case, the selected person is a high school parent and so may not be familiar with the current experience of special education families in our elementary schools.

2. Given that 46.75% of district suspensions are students with disabilities and we don’t even have data on the number of students with 504s (which would likely include many students with ADHD), the level of attention to this matter seems inadequate. Nor was there a discussion of racial or other data.

Perhaps the problem isn’t with the students, but with the training of teachers, staff, and principals.

Dumping the District’s Disabled Kids

Trustees –

You and the district owe the parents of our students with disabilities an apology. And more than an apology, you owe them action. To review:

1. Instead of keeping a successful program in a good classroom and explicitly inclusive school at Ohlone, you’re dumping them into a dilapidated temporary space at the margins of the new campus.

2. Instead of actually reviewing our special education program which is falling further behind their general education peers, Dr. Austin and his staff are making our school district more segregated and doing nothing to improve special education performance. 

3. Instead of reaching out to the special education community at large and the actual, affected families, Dr. Austin and his staff have gotten “buy-in”  from their cherry-picked audiences. In particular, a small parent group that they support and subsidize. That group is now increasingly distrusted by other special education parents.

This is a failure of policy leadership, program oversight, and community and constituent service.