
Credit JAMA Pediatrics, April 6, 2020
by James C. Sherlock
One of the key elements of state and local efforts to support children with behavioral health, educational disabilities, and other challenges is the Children’s Services Act (CSA) (the Act).
In education, its primary role has been paying for placement of children and youth with educational disabilities into private special education schools (PSES).
CSA funds support those students whose educations are judged by the public schools themselves to be too demanding for them to accommodate.
The local CSA Community Policy and Management Teams, appointed by the governing body of the participating local political subdivision, send their own children to those private schools.
I will describe Virginia’s network of PSESs in a follow-on article.
Changes proposed. In a 2020 report, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) had found a long list of seemingly disqualifying flaws in public school special education that would prevent them from accepting students with more severe disabilities than the ones they already try to serve.
Yet there is a movement to remove some severely troubled kids from PSESs back into public schools that have already admitted that they cannot properly serve them.
JLARC, in a disturbingly superficial report in that same year, recommended CSA money be taken away from PSESs and made available to public schools, which is not currently permitted under law.
And that all of the then-fungible CSA school money be administered by the Department of Education, not the Department of Health and Human Resources.
This recommendation was made in the face of the fact that JLARC, in both 2020 reports, admitted the public schools are not equipped to handle these children, much less for the average of 271 days a year they attend PSESs.
So some combination of progressive ed-school dogma, as yet undefined fairy dust and widely non-existent qualified mental health providers and trained special ed teachers are apparently to be sprinkled on the public schools to transform them to be ready to accept children whom they have already referred out to PSESs.
Most of the proposed changes are dangerous, dogmatic and thinly researched nonsense. Continue reading →