Chair Lee on strategies to reduce due process cases
Lee asks about strategies used to reduce due process cases. Vladek describes standing up a tribunal at OATH reducing case time from over a year to under 70 days, strategic litigation, fraud controls, rate studies, and direct service provision, reducing cases from 26,000 to under 16,000.
Because the legal process itself is not very well thought out, where we win the case in the end, but it's taken long enough to get there that we've made all these payments that we shouldn't have had to make.
So lots of things that we're doing that we're very optimistic about.
At the last, the preliminary budget hearing, you went over
as a teacher would, the history of the due process claims
a change that happened under the de Blasio administration whereby the cases would be settled.
They would automatically be settled.
Is that policy changing now and that you are contesting a lot of these due process claims?
That policy changed, we changed that policy several years ago, but we didn't do that in isolation.
The first thing that we did was we said, okay, you know, we have IESP cases over here and tuition things over here and service gaps over here.
Put all of the pieces of machinery that due process requires in one place.
We rationalized it, we streamlined it, and we got strategic about how we manage the cases.
Meaning what?
Meaning we spent a lot of time, and thank you to Comptroller Lander and now Comptroller Levine, because they've helped us identify the cases that should be settled quickly.
Where we didn't make an offer of FAPE, and the student has a placement that works for them, and there's no need for us to fight it, and we can just get that off the docket for everybody's sake.
But we've also developed screening tools to identify what are the cases that need to be scrutinized much more closely.
And so we treat different kinds of cases differently, having stood up this tribunal, because it used to take more than a year to get a case from filing to completion.
So now that we've stood up this tribunal at oath, it's taking us, I think, under 70 days from start to finish.
So no longer...
settling every case without distinction, yeah, we don't settle every case without distinction anymore.
We settle the cases that should be settled.
We litigate the cases that should be litigated.