Vernon school board takes first look at Special Ed

VERNON — The Vernon Township Board of Education's first attempt to address the issues in the district's Special Services Dept. ended in confusion last week.

The school board had originally asked Business Administrator Steve Kepnes for the costs involved in removing all outscourced services from the Special Education budget, but the answer seemed to be neither specific enough and more expensive than anticipated.

The information provided would give each school a full child study team, composed of a social worker, a psychologist and a learning disability specialist, while currently, some of those services are shared between schools. To make this happen, however, Kepnes estimates that the district would have to hire nine staff members at a cost of almost $1 million.

“What we are being told is that we are down nine people,” school board member Ed DeYoung said. “I find it very to believe that we are this short at this point in the year.”

Board of Education President David Zweier suggested that filling all of those positions was a worst-case scenario, and suggested the district focus on the outsourcing of the occupational therapist and physical therapist services.

According to Kepnes, the district has outsourced services since he arrived in the district in 2008. He budgeted $300,000 in his first budget and the amount has gone up year after year. Last year, the district spent $545,000 on outsourced special education services. Through Jan. 13, the district has already spent $213,576, a figure that lead to loud disagreement from the audience.

The board was informed that the district is behind on evaluations of its special education students and to catch up, it would require the services of an additional full-time occupational therapy/physical therapy specialist to catch up by the end of 2015, a claim questioned by staff therapist Joe Janus.

“Not one time have I been made aware that I have been out of compliance with any of my evaluations,” he said.

School board member John McGowan said the current explanation suggests that the district has been out of compliance in some way for a number of years, and that extra staff members or outside consultants are needed to get back in line.

This was discounted by Interim Superintendent Charles Maranzano, who said that the money spent up to this point was used to provide “the usual high variety of services we provide.”

The Board of Education, two days earlier, accepted Maranzano's resignation from the district. His last day will be Feb. 28.

From Zweier's point of view the whole situation should have been handled differently from the start.

“We made a decision to not outsource OT/PT,” he said. “Once we realized we couldn't do it with the staff we had, it should have come back to the board. The discussion should have been had. It's been a complete breakdown and it needs to be rectified.”

The goal, the board agreed, is to bring all OT/PT services back in house, and requested that Kepnes provide the costs and information needed to do that. But the discussion also raised more questions, like “what is not getting done, and why? Why didn't the board see a recommendation?” from DeYoung and from McGowan, “Why didn't they ask for another unit of personnel? Let the board say no.”

Kepnes said that the answer isn't a popular one: money, but board member William Higgins refuted that.

“If it's a spending issue, there are other areas where they could have cut, but they weren't focused on,” he said.

“We have to tip the scales in the other direction now,” DeYoung said. “If we have staff we do need, we need to have justification for it. We aren't seeing that here. Right now we have a broken system, and we need to fix it.”