The Flagler County School District is planning to change the form of its special education staffing. But parents are saying, 'whoa'
BUNNELL — A change in how the Flagler County School District provides support for families of special education students has prompted parents to demand answers and action from the School Board.
Eleven parents, or their surrogates, approached the podium during the April 17 School Board meeting to air their concerns and request reconsideration of the change. Under the new plan, the number of in-school staffing specialists would be reduced from 10 to five. Staffing specialists perform various functions, but it is their role as mediators between parents and teachers that speakers emphasized in opposing the reduction.
Their comments followed an email sent to School Board members by Stephen Furnari, founder of Flagler ESE Advocates, that specifically details the 150-member group’s concerns and requests.
ESE stands for Exceptional Student Education. Approximately 15 percent of the district’s 13,000 students, or 1,932, qualify for individualized education plans, which are created for students in special education. The state recognizes 14 conditions that require districts to offer specially designed instruction and related services. Examples include autism, learning disabilities and emotional disabilities.
The district’s intended change would mark the return to a model previously used by Flagler Schools and currently employed by several other districts, including neighboring Volusia, St. Johns and Putnam counties.
“As much as I’d like something innovative, it’s the model that’s been around for many, many years,” said Timothy King, the district’s director of ESE.
What was innovative about the current system, adopted three years ago, was that it provided staffing specialists at each of the schools. Parents worry that district officials intend to eliminate that position altogether, thus doing away with their mediators.
“They (mediators) can kind of cut through the emotion on both sides of the table,” said Furnari.
It’s an essential role to the parents, who sometimes find themselves disagreeing with a teacher but who may feel intimidated at meetings facilitated by that same teacher.
“Our concern is that if the meeting’s being run by special education teachers and the parent feels that it’s the teacher causing the problem, now you have this potentially heated conversation with the person who’s facilitating the meeting,” said Furnari. “There’s nobody in the room to mediate.”
King said that, even under the new arrangement, a parent can request an ESE expert be present for a meeting.
Half of the district's staffing specialists will be returned to classroom instruction. Those retained in the specialist position would be given additional training and assigned not to a specific school, but rather to specific disabilities.
Staffing specialists oversee, coordinate, monitor and provide technical assistance. They are familiar with the many legal requirements associated with special education and handle critical filings and documentation.
Concerned parents claimed that the move was financially motivated. Furnari’s email to the School Board states that the move would save the district about $500,000.
But King said the change was being made to “build continuity” between elementary, middle and high school programs.
“In all honesty, if I thought this was a bad idea and we couldn’t get experts and really move this forward, then we wouldn’t be doing this,” said King.
Staffing specialists would become experts in specific disabilities and would follow students with those specific conditions across the district from pre-kindergarten through graduation. This would eliminate the need for families to transition to a new staffing specialist as students move to a new school.
King and Furnari disagree on whether that would result in better outcomes. Currently, the district’s performance lags behind that of other districts with comparable enrollment.
According to the latest data from the state Department of Education, Flagler Schools’ dropout rate for students with disabilities ranks among the highest in the state for districts with an enrollment between 7,000 and 20,000. At the same time, the percentage of students with disabilities who were either enrolled in some post-secondary education or were employed two years after leaving school was among the lowest.
Furnari said parents are angry that district officials are making a policy change that will affect their children without including them in the decision-making process.
“I think that the district in not running these decisions by stakeholders was just very short-sighted,” he said.
In his email, Furnari requested the issue be placed on the School Board’s meeting agenda for Tuesday and that board members suspend the plan for now and gather feedback from all stakeholders. The issue does not appear on that agenda, which was posted online Friday. Instead, it was placed on the agenda for the 1 p.m. May 15 workshop session.
Implementation of the new structure is scheduled to take place at the start of the 2018-19 school year.