By: Robin Ford Wallace, Staff Reporter

Perhaps the most disturbing allegation in the complaint filed against Dade County Schools by Donna Thornton, a former assistant principal at Dade County High School, is that the way the system admits students into its special education program is tainted by favoritism.

In her September complaint to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), Ms. Thornton tells the story of a troubled freshman she tried and failed to save in the 2008-9 school year. Riddled with mental and behavioral problems that included bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the girl understood little of what was going on around her scholastically – she had particular difficulty with math – and, as she failed class after class, increasingly became a discipline problem as well.

Ms. Thornton alleges that after she had tried futilely for months to get the girl tested for the special education program, where she could get individualized help, she (Ms. Thornton) was told by DCHS Principal Billy Millican: “You know, if we get her tested and she gets in Special Ed … we can’t ever get rid of her.”

The school did “get rid” of the girl, as it turned out. She was never tested for special education, her behavior problems escalated, she was disciplined – and finally she dropped out.

Then Ms. Thornton tells a story with a happier ending. In the same school year, she writes, a parent of a different freshman, a boy, requested that he be tested for special education because he had failed two classes and, in particular,  had always struggled in math. 

This time the testing happened right away. Why? “It is widely believed that because this student was the nephew of the Superintendent’s secretary, he was accepted for testing and received a fast-track for Special Education that was completed in less than six weeks,” Ms. Thornton writes.

The Sentinel has petitioned Principal Billy Millican repeatedly to defend himself against Ms. Thornton’s allegations, but Millican has steadfastly declined to return phone calls. 

SACS, meanwhile, has refused to pursue any of the charges in Ms. Thornton’s complaint, instead returning it to the Dade County Board of Education for self-examination, and Superintendent Patty Priest has hired an independent education-agency investigator to look into it. 

The Sentinel will, of course, publish the investigator’s findings at such time as his report can be obtained as a public record. Today, though, the Sentinel explores the strange implication conveyed by the Thornton complaint, that admission into the special education program is some prized plum – the rare and coveted Get-Out-of-Math-Free card? – to be awarded to some and denied others at the whim of a school system that even now is reviewing its nepotism policy.

“That’s not what special education’s about,” Georgia Department of Education spokesman Matt Cardoza said flatly when posed the question in those terms.

So what is special education about? The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1997, substantially amended in 2004, requires states that accept federal education dollars – meaning, in effect, all of them – to design special education to meet the needs of young people with disabilities, preparing them for further education, employment and independent living. 

IDEA is only the most current iteration of a long line of similar federal legislation based on the concept that it is fundamentally wrong to deny special-needs children the same access to free public education as so-called regular ones.

And there seems little argument that in Dade, special education is a quality program.  Superintendent Priest in a Nov. 13 interview described psychologists the county contracts with to test children for special education, then special ed teachers and physical and occupational therapists it employs to administer the program.

Special education is designed for kids with all kinds of disabilities – vision, hearing and speech impairments as well as mental and learning disabilities. Schools are required to have an Individual Education Program, or IEP, for each child in the program, a collaboration between parents and all the educators involved in the process.

So what’s not to like about all this individualized attention? “The academics of those children,” said Patty Priest.  “They did not prosper.”   

The school system’s reluctance to put students into special education is not just a perception of Ms. Thornton’s, she confirmed. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a push to get kids out of special education and into the regular curriculum, and this has nothing to do with how much special education costs, educators at both state and county levels insist. “No, no, no,” said Atlanta spokesman Cardoza. “It’s to control the quality of instruction that they receive.”

Until recently, state educators say, too many students ended up in special education, isolated from the libraries, extracurricular activities and other perks of regular schooling, when they might well have managed the standard work load with a little extra help. The thinking now is that teachers then were asking whether a student qualified for the program, but not going on to ask the next question – whether the student really needed it.

Now, says Cardoza, the prevailing wisdom is that keeping kids in the more rigorous regular instruction is simply better academically, and in fact special education students are integrated into regular classrooms whenever feasible, using methods such as collaborative teaching, meaning that a special ed teacher is present along with the regular classroom teacher to give additional help with the material.

“Obviously there are those circumstances where you have to have self-contained classrooms or other special-ed models, but definitely, when possible, having special ed students in a regular classroom, it certainly benefits them,” he said.

A “self-contained” class is one comprised of purely special-ed students, he explained.

At the local level, Ms. Priest says she wants as many Dade students as possible to get a regular, as opposed to special education, diploma. Some “learning disabilities” are diagnosed simply because a child grew up in a household where there were no books and magazines, she said; that doesn’t mean the child can’t learn to read with extra attention. “You try everything first to give them support,” she said. “If that doesn’t work, then you go to the next step, which is the special ed.”  

And even when kids go into the program, she said, the system doesn’t want that to be forever.  “If a child is able to come out, we want them to come out,” she said. “We don’t want them to get in there to begin with.  That’s the reason you do the RTI prior to it.”

“RTI” is Response to Intervention, a months-long process of special help before a student is considered for special education testing. RTI is a relatively new concept; formerly students were referred to special ed by teacher referral.  

In any case, Ms. Priest, though freely admitting her preference for keeping students in the regular curriculum, squarely denies Ms. Thornton’s charge that the system has kept anyone out of special education improperly. “You can’t do that,” she said.  “The federal and state laws won’t allow you to just forget about a kid.”

And it’s not just a matter of integrity, she stresses; even if the intentions of local administrators were not pure, she said, public schools are policed six ways from Sunday by state and federal authorities. “We have programmatic audits, we have money audits, more probably than almost any other agency that’s attached to government,” she said.  

Ms. Priest has dismissed Ms. Thornton’s charges against the school system as retaliation for her firing last spring after two school years at DCHS. Ms. Thornton, meanwhile, insists that she was dismissed because of whistleblowing she did about grade-changing and graduation rate manipulation at the school, the subjects of a previous complaint she made to the state Professional Standards Commission (PSC).

Sandy Addis, the same investigator Ms. Priest has now engaged to examine the SACS allegations, was hired to investigate the PSC complaint last summer. His report exonerated the school board from all charges and ended by filing a PSC complaint against Ms. Thornton herself for possessing the records she used to make her case against the system.