Skip to main contentThe Oregon Department of Education is fining Portland Public Schools for suspending and expelling a disproportionate number of special education students who are also African American.
PPS officials were unable late Wednesday night to say exactly how much money the district will lose in the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years — the time frame for the sanction — but the figure is likely to be significant.
Superintendent Carole Smith's chief of staff, Amanda Whalen, sent an email to Board of Education members Wednesday afternoon, saying the district would lose 15 percent of its Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funding. That pot of money is supposed to ensure that special education students get an appropriate education.
Update on Thursday: A letter from the department of education, dated Aug. 5, says the district will be required to shift $1.47 million from its $9.8 million IDEA fund to early intervention services that address the problem of disproportionate punishment. But because federal law also requires what's called "maintenance of effort" the district will likely have to fill the gap.
Update No. 2 on Thursday: The district will pull $1.47 million from its special-education reserves to fill the gap left by the state mandate to pay for interventions, district officials said Thursday afternoon. But a district spokeswoman, Christine Miles, says that doesn't count as losing money. She also said that what the district called a "financial sanction" in its own correspondence about the education department's actions shouldn't be considered a fine.
Original story: Whalen's email said the education department looked at data from the 2013-14 school year and found "significant disproportionality in the district's use of long-term exclusionary discipline with black students identified as eligible for special education."
The email noted that PPS has seen improvements in its rates of discipline against students with disabilities, black students with disabilities and students overall. But the rates are still higher than the education department allows.
PPS has faced problems with its disproportionate discipline of African-American students for years. WW reported last year that the disparities in discipline of white and black students had continued to grow even as the number of disciplinary cases have fallen overall.
Here's the text of Whalen's email to the board.
WWeek 2015