One of the largest financial sinkholes for the D.C. government is that the city pays for approximately one quarter of its 9,400 special education (SPED) students to attend private school, to the tune of more than $200 million. Why the expense? Because the city’s public and public charter schools have thus far proved incapable of addressing those students’ learning needs. It’s a situation that doesn’t seemed to have improved over the past two years, according to a dismal new report from a federal court monitor who was appointed in 2006 to assess the District’s ability to eliminate a backlog of more than 1,000 SPED cases that were delaying placement for SPED students.

While the city has eliminated that original 1,000, more than 400 new cases have lingered beyond a 150 day deadline that was implemented under the class action suit, Blackman v. District of Columbia. The monitor writes, “the Defendants have not come close to meeting the Consent Decree’s objective performance benchmarks,” and points a finger at D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, suggesting that with her many reform initiatives and “irons in the fire” she was “not able to provide this unifying leadership and management.”

The legal and practical bureaucracy of special education in public schools has long been problematic for the District, and the rising costs of educating SPED students privately led Mayor Fenty to ask the D.C. Council for an additional $9 million in tuition and transportation costs for those students. Without it, and another $6 million for textbooks and maintenance supplies, the school system will be over budget when the fiscal year ends later this month.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen