Last Friday, DEED led a question-and-answer session held at the ASD Board Room. Leading the meeting were Interim Commissioner Barbara Thompson and Eddie Jeans. The larger districts in the state were represented along with charter schools.

A couple things stood out to me:

• Most importantly for us, Commissioner Thompson stated that these proposed regulations are not a response to abuses by in-district programs. There are not any reports of abuses of public funds. This is contrary to what IDEA’s administration stated to their families.
• The regs are being applied to in-district programs because they are so much like the statewide programs and it is a way to establish ‘equity’ among the programs. Although it is the main reason for the sweeping changes it is really a very superficial way of looking at the issue. Clearly, the DEED has not examined closely the in-district programs to declare them the ’same.’ As the questioning continued through the afternoon it became very clear that our hosts did not understand how some of these programs actually work and that, in practicalities, they are different.
• DEED considers a statute that refers to a statewide correspondence school as an authorization by the legislature establishing statewide correspondence schools. Clearly, statute refers to a centralized statewide school, specifically the old Alyeska Central School, not districts enrolling students outside their boundary.

So,there are no abuses to be regulated as we expected. Yet, the state will still add another level of regulation and accountability to in-district schools. A charter school with scarce funds already has five levels of accountability at the local level for spending and yet they will also add the State DEED.

Deadline for written Public Comment is May 8th.

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website