During the June 2014 Delaware Board of Education meeting, Mary Ann Mieczkowski told the board four school districts in Delaware were being worked with in regards to special education compliance agreements or needed intervention. It was not mentioned during the meetings which districts those were, but I reached out to Mieczkowski about this and she gave me the districts. They were Red Clay, Colonial, Christina and Capital. All of these school districts have a very high population special education students. What shocked me was NONE of the charters were listed. I wondered why this was?
Charter schools are their own school districts. Is it possible that charter schools won’t fall into an intervention or compliance agreement due to their small size? The state measures compliance with changes in groups of students with 10 or more being affected. This is called an n#, and those below it are exempt from being included in calculations. With charters, they can easily fall below that number due to their populations, so they may not be included in calculations that would trigger these types of audits.
Maybe it’s time for all the charters to be counted as their own Delaware school district to prevent this type of thing from happening. The charters are well-known to have special education problems in this state. Just look at Delaware online-checkbook to see the funds charters are sending out due to special education issues. Look at Pencader and Moyer as public examples of special education problems. Another matter for the IEP task force to look at…
The Season Of Myths 
You have it, N count or cell size is a major factor. We have been calling this our for years. 4 years ago DOE was stating that they could not go under 40 until FedDOEd “guided” them that is had to be no more than 30. Since then there has been slow progress to using smaller numbers, but it is still to high and inconsistent.
bookworm
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Which is why the current practice is that parents are denied an IEP or 504. If too many students are provided services, they’ll reach that magic number where all of a sudden (gasp) these kids count and (gasp) schools will be accountable for THOSE kids and (gasp) get a bad grade if they don’t do well.
All states received a letter clarifying the relationship between RTI and evaluations ‘pursuant to the IDEA.’ Kids & teachers are smack dab in the center of this cluster-beep.
Gee, I hope my Rob Burgundy shows up when I hit send….
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