Tag Archives: special education audit

Minneapolis’s Dismantling of Citywide Autism Program Continues

March 8, 2016

Background: Almost one year ago, Minneapolis’s once highly touted citywide autism program began to publicly unravel. On the heels of a special ed audit done by consultants from the District Management Council (DMC), Minneapolis’s special ed department was upended, with longtime administrators pushed out and new, perhaps more compliant ones brought in. In the name of “inclusion,” citywide programming is being cut.

This can be seen in a March 17, 2015 email to MPS teachers from newly hired special ed administrator Amy Johnson:

Autism Teachers,

Moving forward (upcoming IEP meetings) under Adaptations on the IEP, please describe the adaptations that your student will receive based on individual student needs instead of describing the Minneapolis CityWide Autism Program specifically:

An example of a statement that should no longer be used is as follows: “(student) receives services and support from the Minneapolis CityWide Autism Program.

This is the first in a series of parent profiles. 

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Maren Christenson

Minneapolis parent Maren Christenson noticed a curious thing a few months ago, when paging through the Minneapolis Public Schools weighty school choice brochure: There were no sites listed for the district’s citywide autism program. 

Christenson has a four-year old son who was diagnosed with autism at the end of 2015. Now, he participates in a  preschool “Buddy Program” at Bryn Mawr Elementary School, where kids with autism are together with “neurotypical” kids.

But he will be five soon, and so Christenson–who says she is still grappling with what it means to have a child with autism–was exploring her options for him, for the coming school year. “I have been trying to figure out which schools are still part of the Citywide Autism Program, and it has been extremely difficult to find any information. There was nothing on individual school websites, and nothing on the Minneapolis schools website,” Christenson says. “And nothing in the school choice brochure.” (Christenson wants to clarify this: there is “nothing on the individual school website or the district page about the Citywide Autism Program specifically.  There is a short blurb in the school choice brochure about autism spectrum disorder programs in general, but it does not mention the Citywide Program specifically.”)

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Christenson’s brochure, with district staff notes

And so she did what any empowered parent would do: she went right to the district for answers. 

“I sat down with one of the district’s special education program facilitators, and she went through the brochure with me, circling the schools in our area that still have an autism program.”

Christenson says she was grateful for the information, but that getting it “shouldn’t be this difficult.”

Eventually, with 36 hours to go until Minneapolis’s school choice window slammed shut, Christenson says the district added information about the citywide autism program to its website. “Needless to say,” Christenson notes, “this does not give parents a lot of time to research what may be one of the most important choices of their child’s education.”

Most research out there says that early intervention–with kids placed in the hands of highly trained autism teachers and staff–is crucial, and a great way to prep kids for later success. For more than a decade, Minneapolis has had one of the state’s best public school programs for kids with autism, including the citywide program, a preschool component and home-based birth to 3 services.

The citywide approach has clustered kids with autism at sites throughout the district, meaning kids with autism were grouped with peers but also had access to mainstream classrooms. Federally required Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs, determined how much time each kid spent in regular ed classrooms. (Parents are quick to point out that attending one’s neighborhood school, rather than a citywide site, has always been an option for kids on the autism spectrum. But many parents say they don’t want their child to be the only kid with autism in a class.)

District insiders and experienced parents acknowledge that not every citywide site in Minneapolis has been worth its weight in gold, but most have been. And district staff will also point out that the autism program was soaring just as other Minneapolis special ed departments–such as the EBD program, for kids with behavior disorders, and the DCD program, for developmentally delayed kids–were suffering from neglect, mismanagement or outright dismantling.

There is a racial component to all of this, as autism is especially prevalent among white and Somali students, while national and local research says that African-American kids are over-identified as having behavior problems, which leads to some students getting stuck in inappropriate special ed settings, or suspended and pushed out of school.

Now, the fear among experienced special ed parents and staff is that district administrators are tearing down the citywide autism program–secretively–rather than building up other special ed departments.

Christenson has another example of how this could be true. Recently, she made an appointment to tour a school with a citywide autism program–Wenonah Elementary–that many experienced parents said was superb. But the day after she made an appointment to visit, a Wenonah employee called to cancel the tour.

Christenson knows why. School staff “checked with the administration to make sure we were eligible to attend, and were told no.  Even though this is a school that shows up on our school choice list when we type in our address on the MPS website.” The Wenonah staff member was “extremely kind and professional and apologetic,” Christenson notes, “but said she had made the call because she had had other parents in the past who wanted to attend her school, and they had been extremely disappointed when they were not eligible, so she just wanted to make sure I wasn’t wasting my time.”

Christenson sums the experience up this way: “My conclusion from this is not only is the Minneapolis Public School District not providing the information that parents need to make informed school choices, but now they appear to be actively going out of their way to prohibit parents from obtaining it on their own.”

For now, Christenson’s son will not be attending kindergarten next year. She says she will give him an extra year to get used to the occupational therapy and other services that go along with being a kid on the autism spectrum. And, despite her complaints about how Minneapolis is handling the autism program, she wants to make one point very clear:

I hope that part of your story will be about how the people on the front lines:  the teachers, the special ed assistants, the bus drivers, the social workers, the aides, are really doing an amazing job given what they have to work with.  It is the system that is broken. In my albeit brief experience, whenever short comings are pointed out to the administration, they have one of two responses:  a) to invalidate the feeling of the person making the point, or b) to blame the failures on the people on the front lines who are clearly doing the very best they can. 

Up next: The story of Esther Oledad and her son, Danny.

No grant, no guru, no outside funding source. My work is entirely funded by my very kind and generous readers. Thank you to those who have already donated!

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