A report presented to the state board of education last week shows wide, and stubborn, gaps in the number of students with special needs at the city's public schools -- particularly the independently operated charter schools.
At some Recovery School District charter schools, less than 4 percent of the students have special needs, while at others upwards of 15 percent do. On average, about 8 percent of the Recovery School District's charter students are classified as special-needs, while 12 percent are in that group at the district's non-charter schools. If distributed evenly, each school would have about 10 percent.
"While I strongly support charters, I will not hesitate to recommend non-renewal if a charter has not made significant progress at admitting its fair share of special ed students," said Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas.Advocates say they still routinely hear stories from families who were discouraged from applying at individual charter schools, or were "counseled out" once there.
"This is just flat-out discrimination, and it flies in the face of the idea of school choice and equal access to education," said Thena Robinson, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But many educators note that because parents can apply to virtually any public school in the city, some degree of variation is inevitable.
"We don't want to send a message that a school has to have X percentage," said Kathy Kilgore, director of the SUNS (Serving the Unique Needs of Students) Center. "Then what does a school do if it doesn't meet its numbers? You can't grow your own kids."
The report, prepared by state education officials, looked only at the Recovery School District charter schools. The district's 33 traditional schools and 37 charter schools must accept any child, regardless of need, from severely autistic children who require a full-time aide to students with speech impairments.
Discrepancies also exist in the percentages of special education students at the RSD's non-charter schools. But only one non-charter, a high-school program in its first year, has fewer than 6 percent special-needs students, compared to 11 charters.
At the Orleans Parish School Board's charter and traditional schools, the numbers range from 16 percent students with special-needs at Bethune Elementary to just over 1 percent at Franklin High School. But unlike the Recovery School District, where all the schools are open enrollment, several of the school board's charter schools, like Franklin, have established admissions criteria making apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.
Caroline Roemer-Shirley, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, said schools with low percentages of special-education students are not necessarily behaving inappropriately or turning away students. For various reasons, they might not attract high numbers of children with special needs or, like Crocker Arts and Technology School, are relatively new and serve students only in the youngest grades.