Whether or not Milwaukee Public Schools seeks all the aid it is entitled to for high-cost special needs pupils has been an issue since the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story strongly suggesting that the district does not.
The issue was discussed at length during last week's meeting of the School Board's Special Education Committee. The issue is a lot more complex than either the newspaper or the district's friends at the Department of Public Instruction made it out to be in the July story.
"Since the inception of this fund we have had ongoing conversations with the Department of Public Instruction and it has become increasingly more frustrating to find we are not eligible...for a very large share of the pot," MPS Special Services Director Patricia Yahle told the committee.
"What they have typically said to us in the past is simply, 'well, it must because you're so large it must a prodcut of the scale of your operation,' " Yahle said.
MPS officials met with DPI after the JS story ran, she said. "There were new strategies that they identified...that they had not identified to us in the past," she said.
The high-cost reimbursement program was designed to benefit smaller districts and generally does disproportionately benefit them, Yahle said. MPS is more likely to use federal funds to cover 100% of costs, more than the state will reimburse. DPI complimented the district for wisely assigning staff to budgets that will fully reimburse costs, Yahle said.
Board member Danny Goldberg said he wanted to stay on the high road in responding to the story and the state, but then acknowledged he was veering off of it.
Goldberg said it is "unbelievably stupid that we have to waste our time responding to this and pretending that the people who are coming here to help us a) can help us and b) would like to help us. So what we're really discussing here is a very good case study in the erosion of the district's capacity to manage its own affairs and further demonstration that we don't have the resources to meet our mission."
The audio of the discussion is posted here.
Sunshine on Salaries
1 day ago
1 comments:
One of the key drivers of the increasing cost of education is that we continue to think that the institution of the "school" (i.e., a building, a locale, a learning venue) is still the best way to teach our children. Why is this? We have ample evidence that the structured approach that the schoolhouse embodies does not work. So, why are we perpetuating this antiquated notion, especially when it is increasingly expensive to do so?
Why not think outside the schoolhouse? Take a new look at how children might best learn? We need to look at the problem of trying to do a better job of teaching our children without making limiting assumptions. A very practical end-to-end solution is described in a recently released commission report, "Education in America -- What's to Be Done?" prepared by Trigon-International. The solution put forward in this report curtails the escalating cost of education. Seem like we should give this some consideration.
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