General Counsel Vladek on due process costs and Carter school accountability

The joke is always that the lawyers are no good at math, but I'm going to give it a try.

But math is everyone's best friend.

Math is everyone's best friend.

So, you know, the last time we were here, we talked about how we've got to think of the ecosystem of special education as not just the DOE budget.

And I think, you know, when DC Foti talks about the impact of her programs and when we talk about the comparative cost for her to develop more seats versus a due process case,

it's really worth expanding on that a little.

We are in a bigger world.

Autism diagnoses are exploding all over the country.

I really highly recommend to everyone the New York Times has begun a series of coverage on the explosion in the provision of quote ABA services autism

Behavioral, what's the A?

Analysis.

Applied behavioral analysis, thank you, ABA services.

Because guess what?

These services are Medicaid reimbursable.

And so the New York Times has begun a series looking at how ABA services are a new cash cow for some well-intentioned people and plenty of bad actors.

Guess what else?

More and more due process cases have autism components to them.

And when we talk about average cost per student of an IEP due process case is $105,000 a year, yeah, that's head and shoulders above what we're spending.

Except if we're talking about autism cases specifically, we're already up at $145,000 a year.

And in addition to the other broad points that my colleagues have made, unlike DCFOD's programs,

all of the Carter schools that receive this funding, $100,000, $150,000, $300,000 a year, there's no accountability.

They don't have to demonstrate to anyone what outcomes they're getting, because as you hear from our leadership and our chancellor first and foremost, we're not just talking about it is a fiscal crisis, it is a moral crisis,

and the moral part of that is we want all of our students to be set up to succeed.

We have no idea what's happening to students once they become harder cases.

There are certain legal eccentricities here that mean once they're a carter,

Carter case in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, they're never coming back to public school.

More and more we have kids who are Carter cases who've never come to public school in the first place.

There's an industry of folks who are, you know, living large on these dollars and there's no

set aside the lack of academic transparency and accountability.

There's also no visibility into where the school's funding is coming from.

How could they exist without Carter dollars?

What are they providing to students and families?

Is everybody certified?

So the money that's moving around in this space

some of which gets chalked up to the due process budget, it's going somewhere.

And unlike the dollars in DCFOD's budget, we have no accounting for what that $1.5 billion is accomplishing.

So it sounds like you're saying how the DOE can support, how the council can support the DOEs by holding accountable some of these institutions with transparency for outcomes?

Yes, absolutely.

And we're not shirking our duty.

We have, we're going to end the year with the number of due process cases down from 26,000 two years ago to under 16,000 this year.

We're going to end the year having gone from 18,000 IESP cases two years ago to under 7,000 cases.

These are huge.

huge changes.

And those, they will generate savings.

Some of the strategies that we've used to bring those numbers down will generate further savings.

Can you talk about some of those strategies that you've used to bring the number of due process claims down?

Absolutely.

So I think first and foremost, what DC FODI referred to and what the mayor has clearly prioritized is making sure we're serving students with IESPs directly.

This is not a thing that used to exist, but now we have hundreds of staff who are devoted to, whether they're psychologists, social workers, teachers, administrators,

providers, to engaging directly through our CSEs with families, ensuring that they have providers who are qualified to provide the services that they need,

exercising some actual oversight so that we can be sure that the services are of an adequate quality.

We've also been working to engage with schools, with private schools where students have IESPs because the law

does not envision school districts having the same extent of responsibility to families who opt out of public school as we have to students who want a public school education.

And so in order to make those dollars make sense in IESP cases, we should be working with schools to determine where we can scale services.

I wish we can scale services.

We're getting a better reception from those schools.

We are finding success.

We have raised rates.

There was a valid complaint for a while that rates had not been raised in a long time.

We did a fair market rate study for set services because that's a unique service that only in New York City do we provide it.

So we had to really get into the weeds of...

What does it actually cost us to provide this?

And that has helped us lower the cost of these services.

And frankly, we've continued to, we have adopted and continued to implement and enforce fraud controls and strategic litigation.

Meaning what?

Meaning, you know, all of these.

16,000 cases, most of them go to a hearing at an independent tribunal.

Well, we are cross-examining witnesses, we are demanding documents, we are insisting on a demonstration that parents actually know there's a case on their family's behalf,

and we're starting to look at moving to recoup some of the funds that go out the door.