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.