NOLA Public Schools erases serious school warnings
28th August 2023 · 0 Comments
By Marta Jewson
The Lens
Today, if a parent were to visit the “parent resources” section of the NOLA Public Schools website and click on “school accountability,” they would find only one item from Superintendent Avis Williams.
In July, Williams issued a warning to McDonogh 35 High School, for sending a child home for the remainder of the school year and failing to follow proper protocol in doing so.
There’s no sign of any other warning issued by Williams to the charters she was hired to hold accountable.
But over the last school year, Williams issued four so-called Level II notices of noncompliance, the most serious warning in the district’s arsenal, to charter schools.
The warnings ranged from failing to provide special education services to failing to follow seclusion and restraint under state and federal laws that make virtually all school employees mandatory reporters. They are reported at monthly board meetings and were posted on the district’s website.
Now, there’s no easily accessible record of those warnings, because of a recent change made by Williams. Once a cited issue is resolved, the NOLA Public School district removes any public website postings of the most severe warnings it issues to charter schools.
That’s a shift from the practice of Williams’ predecessor Henderson Lewis Jr. The result is that parents will have difficulty determining if their child’s school was cited for violating a wide range of educational requirements from providing special education services to meeting state graduation eligibility standards.
Making warnings more difficult to find
There’s no reason to make such warnings more difficult for parents to find, said Hector Linares, a law professor with the Loyola Law Clinic who specializes in educational advocacy. That’s especially important given the federal consent decree that the district has operated under for more than a decade, for failing to provide special-education services.
That consent decree was agreed upon after lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center and other advocates for students, including Loyola’s Law Clinic, filed a 2010 federal lawsuit, P.B., et al. v. Pastorek, to bring Orleans schools into compliance with the federal laws that protect students with disabilities.
The suit charged that governing entities tolerated and even rewarded charter schools that had unrealistically low rates of students with disabilities, either because they refused to enroll such students or pushed them out. P.B., the lead plaintiff in the case, was told to leave Pierre A. Capdau Charter because of “a manifestation of his disability,” his lawyers wrote. Actions that result from a student’s disability are explicitly protected by federal special-education law.
The lawsuit’s plaintiffs sought accountability at a central level, which was lacking in New Orleans once the charter movement began. “As a result of the education reforms that occurred in the city during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, no such single entity exists in New Orleans,” lawyers wrote.
As a result of the consent decree, and gradual return of state-run charter schools to the district, NOLA Public Schools became that entity. But now, parents will no longer be able to look at the track record of their children’s schools.
“These kinds of moves away from transparency are always concerning,” Linares said. “But the district’s decision to remove past notices of non-compliance is particularly worrisome considering NOLA Public Schools is currently seeking to terminate the independent monitoring required by the consent decree issued in the P.B. case.”
When asked about warnings issued this year, a district spokesperson said there had been three Level 2 warnings: one to Lake Forest Elementary, one to Foundation Preparatory Academy and one to L.B. Landry High School.
Lake Forest was warned for violating state law after denying a student’s enrollment. Foundation Prep received a warning after failing to immediately report a physical assault on a special education student by a school employee. Landry failed to complete special education plans for eight students as required by law.
Of those three, only the warnings for Lake Forest and Foundation Prep made it to the district’s website, where the public could see them.
“The first two were posted and removed once closed/resolved,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to The Lens. “The Landry notice was immediately corrected and was subsequently not posted.”
Still, the Algiers Charter School Association, which runs Landry, got a notice of the high school’s Level 2 notice on September 13 and had resolved it by September 18. Five days elapsed. Enough time to post it online.
And regardless of how quickly an issue was resolved, advocates like Linares say that all warnings should be retained online and kept readily available.
“Making this kind of information easily available to parents and the general public is important because it helps us track patterns of non-compliance and determine whether the district is fulfilling its obligations related to oversight and accountability effectively,” Linares said.
This article originally published in the August 28, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
