This week Mary Ann Koruth reports that the Murphy Administration’s Department of Education has not yet issued a mandated report that is supposed to be written by a “special education ombudsman,” according to a law passed in 2016.  The North Jersey Media journalist is focused on the 2020-2021 report, a year when students with disabilities suffered disproportionately compared with typical students. Yet the DOE has yet to issue a single report since former Gov. Chris Christie signed the law just before he left office; one reason may be the Department failed to hire anyone for the role until 2019.

Koruth quotes Elizabeth Athos, attorney for educational equity at the Education Law Center:

“This annual report is crucial for understanding the state of special education in New Jersey, and it’s required by law. If we don’t have a clear picture of issues in special education, how can we fix them? ”She said it is “simply disgraceful” that the Department of Education “hasn’t been able to produce a single report in any of the six years since the law took effect.”

North Jersey Media requested copies of the report but never heard back from the DOE. “ When pressed for comment, the spokesperson for the department said “the report with the data for the 2019-2020 time period is being finalized and should be available in the near future.” Education Law Center filed an Open Public Records request for the report too: the DOE has responded by extending its deadline to reply 13 times.

DOE spokesperson Shaheed Morris said the 2020-21 special education ombudsman’s report is “under review” and “not ready to be released.”

Koruth reports that, according to education advocates, one of the big problems at Murphy’s DOE is the lack of staffing and institutional knowledge. As reported here, the DOE currently has 147 vacancies which has resulted in a “strained and understaffed” agency.

From the article:

The loss of staff at the Education Department is still a “large problem” despite a recent uptick in hires, said Mary McKillip, a researcher at the Education Law Center who analyzed staffing data between 2018 and 2022.

A “disproportionate number” of those staffers were in higher-level positions, and their leaving was “a tremendous loss of institutional knowledge,” she said. The number of staffers fell from 620 to 552 between 2018 and 2022, the center said.

“I don’t think there are enough hands on deck at the Department of Education to handle the amount of work that these folks are doing on a day-to-day basis,” State Board of Education member Joseph Ricca said about the delay in the report. “This is very complex work, very time-intensive, and also requires highly skilled people to do it.” He said the state government is working to fill positions throughout the department and that people working there are dedicated but the state needs to help them do their jobs.

Also,

The Education Department’s “capacity is the weakest I’ve seen since I’ve been doing this work,” said Peg Kinsell, longtime head of SPAN advocacy, a group that addresses disability issues in children. Big programmatic changes, accountability and monitoring are “hard when you don’t have a lot of staff,” she said.

However, “If the developmental disabilities ombudsman can write a robust report on his minimal staff across the population that he has to be an ombudsman for, I don’t see where the department can use that as an excuse that they are understaffed,” Kinsell said.

Kinsell is referring to the report released last week by Paul S. Aronsohn, the Ombudsman for Individuals with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities and Their Families. Aronsohn has produced a report every year since his appointment in 2018. He does not report to the Department of Education.