2020 School Board Candidates Respond to SEPTA Questionnaire – Question 7

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Question 7

Do you support the recommendations in the 2019 Program Evaluation for Students with Disabilities and Those Receiving Interventions? If so, what will you do to support implementation? Which recommendations would you prioritize? 

Answers are listed in alphabetical order by the candidates’ last names.

Cristina Diaz-Torres 

Steven Krieger

For the purpose of this Program Evaluation, PCG provided recommendations drawn from the following key findings that emerged as consistent issues.

1. District culture limits the ability of those charged with special education, Section 504 and ATSS oversight to implement and enforce priority practices.
2. Site-based management has resulted in significant variations in service delivery between school buildings.
3. APS has a highly active and engaged parent community. However, this engagement, when coupled with site-based management, leads to increased inconsistencies among schools.
4. Rapid enrollment growth and changes in leadership make the need for documented district-wide policies and universal professional learning opportunities even more critical.
5. While the new professional learning framework is promising, it is still “choice” based. Principals and school-based staff need additional quality, ongoing baseline training to serve in their roles.

I strongly support these findings and recommendations as a mechanism for providing better equity and inclusion for students with disabilities. As I have mentioned throughout this questionnaire, APS cannot continue to claim excellence in student education until provisions are made such that students with disabilities, as well as other vulnerable or marginalized groups, are provided with the equitable access to opportunity and achievement enjoyed by their non-disabled peers. This will require a data-driven process with benchmarks to allow us to measure our success.

We need a School System, not a system of independent schools. To achieve that, APS must make sufficient changes to its site-based management system in order to comply with the recommendations of the evaluators. These changes must consist of:

• setting an overall district-wide vision for providing high quality services to students with disabilities and those requiring intervention. APS must strengthen the OSE and, in conjunction with the new CDEIO, create an expectation regarding instruction that clearly communicates to schools, and the broader community. The most critical focus of the OSE should be to ensure that students with special needs make significant progress, to the greatest extent possible, in the general education curriculum, receive rigorous standards-aligned instruction, and experience the high quality delivery of interventions, differentiation, accommodations, modifications and specially designed instruction in every class. Serious consideration needs to be given to the level of autonomy schools can and should have when supporting programming for students and how district-wide initiatives are implemented.

• beginning the process of providing special education services in more inclusive educational settings to students with disabilities to ensure more equitable access to school choice and high-quality instruction. APS must create a consistently operational framework in every school, thereby ensuring all students receive the instruction and interventions they need to support academic and social/emotional learning, and to achieve at a higher level of performance.

• hiring, training and retaining individuals with dedicated and proven experience. Never has this been more important than it is right now given our current crisis. Cultural competency and consistent professional learning cannot be optional. As new personnel start in key leadership positions, it will be critical that they understand the challenges and implicit biases within the system and organize both human capital and financial resources in a manner necessitated by our current conditions to carry out all of the recommendations and ultimately provide excellent education to all of our students.

Sandy Munnell

I appreciate how the consultants laid out the recommendations; first the goal, then followed by the key factors under each recommendation. One can clearly see the overlap across all the goals for strengthening leadership, data collection to ensure consistency across all schools, professional learning and family engagement.

It should be clear by now that I come firmly down on professional learning. I strongly support building capacity at each school through the adoption of an SSC for each elementary school first, and then middle, and then high school as funds in the budget permit adding these FTEs. I support that the SSC role should be focused primarily on the intentional support for the classroom teachers, aides and special education teachers for the benefit of the students. This would be my top priority.

In order to deliver services and support all students consistently across the school division, it is necessary for the schools to align themselves with the vision of the school board on inclusion. As a school board member, I would support the recommendation in the Evaluation that, in order to bring school leadership into compliance, two things should happen. One, mandatory annual training for principals and assistant principals to ensure compliance with the division’s goals. Second, use data to monitor that compliance. Overall, give the Office of Student Services the leverage they need to have oversight in the schools.

As an educator who has seen vision statements, implementation plans, trendy school designs, and the best intentions come and go over the years, I believe that the time has come to stick to a plan. To achieve what the Evaluation recommends will take several years. If there is a will on the School Board for this to happen, it will happen. I would like to be part of that team to make it happen.

David Priddy

Yes, I support the recommendations in the 2019 Program Evaluation. As your school board member, I will push for those recommendations I mentioned in my answer to question #6. In terms of priority, question #2 outlines the priority for the three main items that I believe need to be addressed first.

Terron Sims

As you all are aware, the 2019 Program Evaluation for Students with Disabilities and Those Receiving Interventions (PESDTRI) is extremely robust. That being said, the mandated policy changes are necessary and long overdue. Two things need to occur in order for the public to trust that APS fully implements the mandates: Transparent oversight; Fixing our broken budget. 

For transparent oversight, the Superintendent ought to form an advisory committee consisting of community leaders and educators. This advisory committee would provide the superintendent and the senior staffer overseeing PESDTRI the opportunity to discuss APS’ progress with the committee, and vice versa. A committee of this nature encourages the creation of new ideas and methods that otherwise would not exist if the two parties would not have met.

The second is creating a real budget and budget process. Until APS crafts a budget that outlines every requirement and every FTE and forecasts out to at least 5 years, the superintendent will never be able to clearly and properly outline and explain to the public APS’ PESDTRI priorities. For example, if APS has 5 years to implement a particular PESDTRI mandate, budget forecasting enables APS to clearly identify the funding for those mandates so that the public is fully aware that APS is being diligent in its actions. 

In good conscience, I cannot state what my PESDTRI priorities are until a full APS evaluation occurs. Until more data is provided, my instincts have me categorizing APS implementation by the following: Level of egregiousness; Implementation cost. Gathering the data around these two data points is a good first step in determining how APS adheres to PESDTRI.

S. Symone Walker

Yes, I support all of the recommendations in the 2019 program evaluation. I would prioritize inclusive education and accountability, which received an implementation evaluation scale of 2 based on the 2013 PCG program evaluation.  Consistent with the response I outlined in #3 above, to begin to “right the ship” in terms of equity, disproportionality, inconsistencies, and underidentification, I would further prioritize the recommendations for referral and eligibility followed closely by the recommendations for special education.