JAMES: The Investigation Into Racial Slurs At This Newark High School Must Be Made Public
October 26, 2023Newark Superintendent León Convenes the High School Redesign Strategy Fall Partners Meeting
October 27, 2023Vernon Township Residents: This District Plays Favorites and Mismanages Our Money
As districts throughout the country face a “fiscal cliff,” the point when all that federal COVID emergency money runs out, school leaders are facing difficult decisions, especially those that ignored warnings to not use a short-lived cash infusion to unsustainably hire lots of teachers.. Chad Aldeman predicts that over the next two or three years 136,000 teachers across America will lose their jobs.
Yet not all school districts are facing as steep a fiscal cliff as Vernon Public Schools in Sussex County which recently laid off 44 teachers while cutting after-school clubs and late buses—and that’s before the COVID money runs out next year. This is a district, according to parents and residents, where both the new president of the board of education (the former one resigned in September) and the superintendent have conflicts of interest because their spouses are teachers in the district; where the current Director of Curriculum & Instruction, reportedly a friend of the board president, has had his salary doubled in five years time; where over the last seven years the school board has churned through four superintendents and several Business Administrators. Currently Vernon is conducting a “forensic audit” to account for fiscal discrepancies.
This is also a district that elects to send two children—one a child of a board member—to highly-priced private special education schools that are not approved by the State Department of Education even though the district has what is reportedly a stellar special education program.
Most of this information, verified through Open Public Records Act (OPRA) requests, comes from several residents. One, Carolyn Incarnato, agreed to be named. The others have children in school and are fearful of retaliation.
District leadership knows there are problems, and it’s not just raucous board meetings. A year ago, current superintendent Russell Rogers and Business Administrator Patrica Ratcliffe-Lee wrote to the Executive County Superintendent,
“Our Acting Superintendent, appointed in August 2022, our Business Administrator, appointed at the end of May 2022, and the Acting Assistant Superintendent, appointed at the end of September 2022, were all not part of the 2022-23 budget process. As the 2022-23 school year got underway and the September 15th payroll was processed, it became evident that significant expenses had not been included in the 2022-23 budget and that the 2021-2022 budget surplus was significantly lower than had been estimated when the 2022-23 budget was prepared.”
While the district has myriad issue to address, let’s focus on those two peculiar placements for students classified as eligible for disabilities. That’s remarkable in a district that has such strong in-district programming for students with disabilities that it only sends 33 students to non-district schools. (One other oddity: according to the district’s Performance Report, 24.3% of students of the district’s 3,000 K-12 students are classified as eligible for special education, way above the state average of about 16%.)
If a Child Study Team decides a child’s only placement is in a non-state-certified private school–which happens rarely— the district must file a Naples Act Placement request to get an exception. Naples requests for these two atypical placements either were made years late or not made at all.
One placement in particular irks residents I spoke to because it is for the child of school board member Adina Hope. (I don’t name parents to protect the child’s privacy but in this case Hope has spoken publicly about her child’s placement. At the September 14th school board meeting [at 1.12], when the time for public comment came around, she stepped away from the board table and went to the microphone; the board president was so nonplussed she called a five-minute recess to check with the board attorney that this was legal.)
In the case of Hope’s child, the district didn’t file a Naples Act Placement request for her placement of choice, Flex School in Berkeley Heights, until two years after the placement when a resident started asking questions. Flex School’s website says it serves “twice exceptional children,” i.e., those who are both gifted and have learning disabilities. Vernon has both a robust special education department, a gifted and talented program, and even a program for those twice exceptional. No one else from Vernon goes to this school, just this school board member’s child.
Private special education schools can be expensive but Flex School is unusual: according to OPRA requests, the total costs (tuition, transportation, an aide) from November 2021-June 2024 adds up to $558,000.
The second non-approved placement is more problematic, especially for those (like me) who have a child on the autism spectrum. A student in Vernon has been placed at “Spectrum Consulting” which uses a widely-discredited communication system called “Rapid Prompting Method (RPM)” where a facilitator guides a student to point, either on a keyboard or a letter chart, to individual letters, theoretically allowing non-verbal students to express themselves. On Spectrum’s website, founder Lisa Strata warns parents, “When talking about RPM to others please DO NOT SAY YOUR CHILD COMMUNICATES USING RPM. (I admit that I have said this in the past!)”
Why the warning? From the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association:
“The Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) is not recommended because of prompt dependency and the lack of scientific validity. Furthermore, information obtained through the use of RPM should not be assumed to be the communication of the person with a disability.”
A scholar of these methods, who is autistic himself, writes, “ultimately, the fact that there isn’t a clear empirical evidence base demonstrating that RPM practitioners don’t hijack autistic people’s communication (see Schlosser et al., 2019) makes me somewhat suspicious.”
Also, according to the people I spoke to, Vernon has never submitted a Naples Act Placement to the DOE for this unconventional placement.
How much is this placement costing Vernon residents? The tab for October 2021-June 2024 is $652,631.10. . Below is a board agenda for just this year which shows an outlay of $208,651.10.
Of course, with an annual operating budget of $71.5 million, these placements might seem trivial. So could the loss of a few teachers or the elimination of after-school activities. Yet just last month district leaders had to send a request to the state Department of Education for permission to exceed the class size cap for a math resource room in an elementary school. (Request was granted; letter below.) Why is it, these residents are asking, that Vernon can’t abide by best practices for all students, regardless of disability status or placement? Why can’t it hold superintendents and business administrators and board leadership accountable for fiscal mismanagement?
The questions just keep coming.
7 Comments
I have been actively involved with pointing out these glaring issues of mismanagement for several months at BOE meetings. Our superintendent has been unwilling to discuss the issues and he, as well as our recently departed business administrator have attempted to thwart our efforts to get satisfactory answers. We now know these two individuals even lied about imports issues we tried to uncovered via OPRA requests. They even tried to derail our efforts for a much needed forensic audit. I am so thankful for your willingness to investigate and report on these issues.
I am very disappointed by the information regarding RPM in this article. I am a mother of Autistic twins in VTSD who are spellers. We do not use RPM as we use Spelling to Communicate (S2C), which is a completely different method but we know families who have used RPM to achieve independent typing. I have been advocating for S2C in our school district for two years. There is science to support it’s use and Dr. Elizabeth Torres, professor and researcher from Rutgers University supports spelled communication especially with all of her latest Autism research and identifying it as sensory motor differences. Please go back and listen to my VTSD BOE speeches from 1/19/23 and 9/21/23 to better understand this issue.
Study supporting S2C: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32398782/
Please, please, please understand that there’s so much more to spelled communication. I understand the initial concerns behind Facilitated Communication, which led to ASHA’s statement on FC and RPM. I would hate for the information in this article regarding RPM to discredit Autistic voices, especially those who have reached independent typing as a result of RPM. For example, Elizabeth Bonker from Sussex County’s Byram Township. She used RPM to achieve independent typing and graduated from Rollins College as valedictorian. Valedictorian speech: https://youtu.be/8g5aJExZQwg?si=a-JhVLe4obCZNcKk
I understand the concerns stated in this article deeply and have my own grievances with VTSD. My most important issue is accessing robust communication utilizing my sons’ preferred communication method, which must be honored under ADA. Our preferred method is Spelling to Communicate (S2C). We have been fighting soooo hard for access to our basic human right to communicate. Please, please understand there’s so much more to this than what you’ve included in this article. I have many resources if you’d like to reach out.
Please look into more research on RPM and spelled communication: https://unitedforcommunicationchoice.org/research/
🙏🏽
This scientific presentation on spelled communication was at Rutgers University in April, hosted by NJACE, which was funded by the New Jersey Governor’s Council for Medical Research and Treatment for Autism: https://youtu.be/KyWoWfUC0zw?si=qHgd-Q0dDizJOizC
Also — a presentation by SLP, Elizabeth Vosseller and Autistic nonspeaker/speller, Ian Nordling: https://youtu.be/RJF_Xocij9g?si=MbLBPxstmhuOYLzJ
Ms. Waters,
Great article.
Very accurate and well written.
We have serious problems with the BoE.
Thanks for allowing the general public to get educated and hopefully involved with the necessary steps to repair the damage.
Bill Higgins
The entire town hall and boe should be investigated and those responsible for rampant corruption should be jailed. This is a minimal issue compared to intentional over assessment of the poor, for handouts to the rich.
https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/propertytaxdata.uchicago.edu/nationwide_reports/web/Sussex%20County_New%20Jersey.html