Thread by @MichaelGKagan

18 months ago, CCSD received this report about special education in the Las Vegas Valley. It is damning, finding racial disparities, inadequate curriculum, teacher qualifications and funding, and organizational problems. THREAD 1/x

go.boarddocs.com/nv/ccsdlv/Boar…

Before highlighting some key failures, the elephant in the room: @GovSisolak and #NVLEG have not provided adequate funding for schools. They should not campaign on having fixed it (they haven’t). Nor should anyone criticize them without supporting the necessary taxes. 2/x

Inadequate funding means bloated class sizes, lower salaries for frontline staff, chronic staff vacancies, and (likely) more difficulty attracting and retaining the highly skilled educators who are desperately needed. It makes everything else harder, if not impossible. 2/x

Let’s start with race and school discipline. All kids with special ed plans (IEPs) are much more likely to be suspended from school. And black kids with IEPs are much more likely to be suspended than other kids with IEPs. 3/x

Disparate treatment of black kids in special ed starts with how they are identified and labeled. Black kids are more likely to be categorized as “emotionally disturbed” (ED). White kids are more likely to be identified with autism, a more sympathetic label. 4/x

ED is an unfortunate label (we should not call kids “disturbed”). But the label is in the law, and sometimes applying it is technically correct. But it can also reflect a failure to make the effort to fully evaluate for other disabilities. 5/x

The report highlights systematically inadequate qualifications of many key personnel in CCSD. That’s hard to talk about. But no curriculum or plan will matter if the district can’t hire staff with the right skill sets. 6/x

The report documents a general tendency by the district to pull kids out of general education more than it should, to resource room for part of the day of self-contained classes all day. The report says that failures to teach kids effectively in gen ed feeds this tendency. 7/x

Unfortunately, the report documents special ed kids in CCSD are between a rock and a hard place. Overcrowded and understaffed gen ed, or supposedly specialized education settings that actually aren’t designed to teach them much better. 8/x

The most damning criticism of CCSD @SuptJaraCCSD and the trustees is that they have actually not implemented programs designed to actually teach kids with common disabilities. Teachers are just left on their own to figure it out. 9/x

This failure to actually have true special education curricular programs - even though there is extensive research in the field and legal mandates to offer them - is why the district just lost the Rogich lawsuit, about dyslexia, costing at least $456,000. thenevadaindependent.com/article/judge-…

Remember: A resource room is not a special education program. It’s just a room. I could call my kitchen pantry a resource room, but it still won’t be a good place to teach children. CCSD needs actual research-backed programs, and teachers to implement them. 10/x

I’ve just included some highlights here, from a long and complex report. It’s also now more than a year old. So the real question for state and district leaders: Has anything been done? 11/x