Pact reached in long-running special education case 

Posted: 1:14 pm Mon, March 8, 2010
By Caryn Tamber
Daily Record Legal Affairs Writer

When Martin O’Malley toured Baltimore City schools as mayor, special education teachers used to ask to speak with him privately.

“You’ve got to get us out of this lawsuit,” the teachers told the now-governor, he recounted.

The teachers wanted out of Vaughn G. v. Board of Commissioners, a long-running lawsuit over the adequacy of special education in Baltimore, and they complained that court oversight meant they were too overwhelmed with paperwork to teach properly, he said.

O’Malley spoke Monday at a news conference announcing that the city and state have reached a settlement with advocates for special-needs children.

The agreement means the end may be in sight for Vaughn G., which was filed in 1984.

Senior U.S. District Court Judge Marvin J. Garbis gave preliminary approval to the plan, which calls for the suit to be dismissed in September 2010 unless advocates for the plaintiffs can prove lack of compliance.  There will be a public hearing on the proposal on April 19.

Representatives of the Maryland Disability Law Center, which represents the special-education plaintiffs, joined city and state representatives at the news conference. MDLC attorney Leslie Seid Margolis praised the government for substantial improvements in special education over the last few years.

Reached by telephone later, Margolis said O’Malley hadn’t given the whole story of the avalanche of teachers’ paperwork. Some of the forms were required by the consent decree in Vaughn G., but many others were of the district’s own creation and not necessarily the best solution to the decree’s requirements, she said.

Andrés Alonso, CEO of the Baltimore City Public Schools, said the district has made great progress in recent years, included integrating special-needs students into mainstream classrooms and getting them special-education services in a timely manner.

But, he acknowledged, there is “no such thing as an end if the goal is to meet the needs of every single student in the city.”

The school district must still work to close the achievement gap between special-education students and the general student population, to make sure special-education students are getting uninterrupted, appropriate services and to address discipline issues, he added.

Margolis said it would not have been productive to continue pressing the case based on the remaining issues; instead, plaintiffs’ lawyers say they are committed to working with the city and state over the next two years.

While “work remains to be done,” she said at the news conference, “continued litigation would serve nobody’s interests well, least of all those of the students in Baltimore City.”

University of Maryland School of Law professor Susan Leviton, who was one of Vaughn G.’s original attorneys but left the case in the 1980s, said it is undeniable that the district has improved special education.

“When [the case] first started, they didn’t even know how many kids were in special ed,” she said. “They didn’t know where the kids were. So clearly they’ve made progress in that regard.”

But, Leviton said, there is so much more to be done.

“They’ve made a lot of progress on putting kids in mainstream, but they haven’t made a lot of progress in determining what the extra services are those kids need to be successful in mainstream,” she said.

The school system must also improve its career services for students and reading training for students with special needs, she said.

The original complaint in Vaughn G. alleged that the city school district failed to perform special-education assessments or develop Individual Education Plans for special-needs students. The case was settled by consent decree in 1988 and an independent monitor, known as the special master, was appointed. Another consent order was entered in 2000.

The new settlement will do away with the master’s office.

Paying for failure

Perhaps the district can put the resulting savings toward addressing its remaining problems, Leviton suggested. She said society must pay to either educate special-needs students now or take care of them later.

“When we fail them in school we pay,” she said. “We pay a lot. We pay to put them in jail, or provide welfare benefits because they’re unemployable.”

Vaughn G. himself, 14 at the time the suit was filed, has acquired a long criminal record over the last quarter century.

He sat for an interview with The Daily Record in 2003, when he was incarcerated on drug distribution charges concurrent with two parole violations relating to assault/domestic violence.

At the time, Vaughn L. Garris envisioned a career for himself — one in which he would help other inmates make the transition from prison to free society.

Today, though, he appears to be back behind bars.

Court records show a Vaughn L. Garris, born April 1970, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for killing a neighbor after sneaking through a crawl space shared by their adjacent townhouses. He was looking to burglarize Chontae Waters’ house but ended up stabbing her when she interrupted the attempt, according to reports at the time of his guilty plea in 2008. He is serving a life sentence.