JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - Mississippi officials say the Jackson city school district now meets special education standards, after it nearly lost its accreditation in 2012 over problems educating students with disabilities.
The state’s second-largest school district has agreed to let the state Department of Education monitor its progress through the 2014-2015 school year and has promised to draw up a plan to sustain the progress it’s made.
Jackson Superintendent Cedrick Gray said he expects that the state’s Commission on School Accreditation, a subsidiary body under the state Board of Education, will remove Jackson’s probationary status soon.
“I believe we are on the right course of making a difference in the lives of our students,” he told the state Board of Education Thursday.
Gray thanked board members for deciding not to revoke accreditation in 2012. That would have allowed students to freely transfer out of the district and would have curtailed sports and extracurricular competitions.
The state had been investigating problems with special education in Jackson since at least 2010. In December, the state reviewed 21 student files and determined that Jackson had corrected problems found in those cases that were sampled, according to a letter written by Tanya Bradley of the state’s Office of Special Education.
“Moving forward, it is imperative the district develop and implement a comprehensive district sustainability plan; one that is powerful in action and powerful in effect to ensure continued improvement and systemic change for all students with disabilities enrolled in the district,” she wrote.
But special education advocates say progress is uneven and they still get plenty of complaints about how the district treats students with disabilities. Joy Hogge, executive director of Mississippi Families as Allies for Children’s Mental Health, said her group believes the state should not yet release Jackson from its agreement. She said there has been some progress, and while schools are doing a good job, others are not.
Among the problems she cited are parents who have trouble persuading the district to do an initial assessment of a child’s disabilities, especially in a comprehensive fashion. She also said that teachers are not following the individualized education plans that have been written for other children. Hogge also said that the district still struggles to handle children with behavioral disorders.
“I think there needs to be a lot more evidence that the district is listening to parents when they say that their child has a disability,” Hogge said Thursday.
A lawsuit against the state Department of Education claiming it hasn’t addressed “systemic” failings in Jackson special education is still pending. The state has asked that it be dismissed, saying in part that the plaintiffs didn’t exhaust their administrative appeals before going into court. Corrie Cockrell, a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs, said she thought the state’s review was too narrow because too much of it had focused on only 21 files.
“We are disappointed that MDE reviewed such a small number of cases to make this determination,” Cockrell said Friday.
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