School Called ‘Dumping Ground’

A draft state report accuses city officials of allowing schools to ban special education students and in the process transform a Bronx middle school, M.S. 201, into a “citywide dumping ground” by placing them there instead.The allegation does not appear in a final version of the report, which describes the school’s special education population as “significant” but does not use the phrase “dumping ground” and does not place blame on the city Department of Education.The state Education Department provided the final report yesterday evening after The New York Sun obtained the draft version and asked for comment.The report is being released just after city officials told parents and teachers yesterday that M.S. 201 will close this June and reopen in the fall with a substantially changed staff. Its principal, John Hughes, will keep his job but half of the teachers will be fired, a city school spokesman, David Cantor, said.M.S. 201 has been on the state’s failing list for at least four years in a row, and it received an “F” on its latest city report card.The state report was prepared as a regular assessment of schools that have spent several years on the failing list and become, in the state’s parlance, Schools Under Registration Review.The draft version bluntly blames the department for the school’s troubles.“The NYC Department of Education must stop using MS 201 as what appears to be a citywide dumping ground for special education students who, one can only assume, are assigned to MS 201 because they are not welcome in their neighborhood schools,” the draft declares. “To continue to burden a School Under Registration and Review with such an inappropriately structured student body is to doom it to failure.”The final version is more diplomatic, saying M.S. 201 is “at the forefront of a new initiative for school improvement” while outlining some challenges ahead, including special education.“The leadership must work with the New York City Department of Education to address the increasing enrollment of students with disabilities assigned to MS 201, particularly since many of these students live outside of the school’s neighborhood,” the report says.A state Education Department spokesman, Tom Dunn, declined to comment on the change, saying he would not discuss a draft report.State report card data from 2006 suggest that 27% of M.S. 201’s students have disabilities, and a school official who requested anonymity said the percentage has since climbed to 29%. Data on five other middle schools in District 8, meanwhile, show lower rates, beginning at 13% for J.H.S. 125 and peaking at 20% for M.S. 301.To explain the discrepancy, Mr. Cantor pointed to M.S. 201’s neighborhood. “Several elementary schools nearby have a significant number of children with disabilities,” he said. “If a school isn’t helping these students succeed, as M.S. 201 hasn’t, it is failing in its core mission.”Both the state’s final and draft reports argue that the rate is due in part to high numbers of students coming from outside M.S. 201’s zone, and the school source said 40% of special education students come from outside.The “dumping ground” contention closely follows arguments advocates have made about the city’s new small high schools, which they say illegally deny spots to disabled students and English-language learners, leaving nearby traditional high schools to educate unusually high numbers of those students.A special education law expert, David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College professor who filed a formal complaint against the small schools with the federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in 2006, said he was not surprised to see middle schools accused of shutting students out. He said recent moves by the Bloomberg administration to give principals more autonomy are likely enabling the exclusions.“The supervisory structure doesn’t have a handle on what’s really going on in the schools,” Mr. Bloomfield said. “It started with the small schools, which effectively had discretion over enrollment; extended then to the empowerment schools, and now, with that latest restructuring that went into effect last year, it’s been extended to the entire system.”The executive director of Advocates for Children, Kim Sweet, said she has chronicled exclusion by small high schools but is not aware of an analogous middle school phenomenon. She said recent moves to open up middle school enrollment, making it more like a marketplace, could drive schools to exclude.“If everyone’s sprucing up their school and going out and trying to attract the best students, then you have to wonder where the kids with special needs are going to go,” she said.

School Called ‘Dumping Ground’

School Called ‘Dumping Ground’

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