Great article by Walter Brooks in case you missed it:

Cape special education's sobering numbers

Sooner or later, some smart Cape school district will zero in on special education as the next school choice opportunity

 

Article | Education | February 28, 2014 - 2:00pm | By Walter Brooks

School districts have “nowhere to hide” when it comes to special education services.

Special Ed Funding Explained

Cape school districts can’t hide from $pecial ed costs

Over the past several weeks much has been written and said about the budget challenges facing the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District. The “Valentine’s Day Layoffs” at Dennis-Yarmouth were blamed on cost overruns in the district’s special education program.

Just scratching at the surface of Cape special education spending yields sobering numbers. When one considers the out-placement tuition ($19 million), funds paid to the Cape Cod Collaborative ($10 million) and the Nauset region’s elementary districts special ed expenditures ($8.5 million) – we found over $37.5 million in special ed expenditures – and that’s without adding in each of the other school districts’ SPED costs.

In order to understand the funding formula for special education, we reached out to Senator Dan Wolf. We received a prompt response, submitted by Senator Wolf’s chief of staff, Elysse Magnotto-Cleary. Ms. Magnotto-Cleary told us she prepared this response after consulting with Rep. Cleon Turner. The statement from Senator Wolf’s office is reproduced verbatim, below.

District pay 4 times the school's foundation amount

 

First, every school district is expected to pay for special education at four times the school's per pupil foundation amount.

 

For example, if the per pupil (foundation per pupil) is $10,000 then the school must pay 4 times that, $40,000, before the state will get involved.

Then, the state will provide reimbursement if the total amount of a school's special ed costs for the current year is 125% of last year's special ed costs. The state's involvement is a maximum of 75% of that added cost (depending on budget appropriations).

The state has provided full funding for that 75% for the last three or four budgets. Part of the difficulty for schools is that the school has to spend that money this fiscal year and reimbursement comes in the following fiscal year in four quarterly payments. That is like you total your car in an accident and the insurance company pays you next year in quarterly payments.

 

Note that a schools per pupil foundation amount is less than the actual per pupil costs. That is because the school's total budget is made up of the foundation amount and the above foundation amount. DY's per pupil cost considering the total budget is $13,859 so its foundation per pupil cost would be something less than that.

 

Chapter 71B, section 5 describes the issue of a student moving into the district after budgets have been set. That, too, is complicated.

 

Special ed averages about 20% while the state pays 12%

 

There is a page on the DESE web site that says that the percentage of school budgets for special ed averages about 20% while the state actually pays 12%.

 

There is no incentive for schools to exaggerate the number of special ed students because schools lose money on the reimbursement. There is also a disadvantage to some extent for schools such as DY that do as much as possible to keep their special ed students local (in the school rather than out of district) because parents of special ed students may shop around for schools that treat special ed students better or that keep them in the school so they can be at home with their families.

And, for edification, if there is a DY special needs student that goes to a charter school, it is DY that pays the special ed costs, not the charter school. If there is a charter school student with an IEP, it is DY that pays the costs of the IEP, not the charter school.

Chilling Take-Away
A chilling take-away from the explanation above is that a town school district has “nowhere to hide” when it comes to special education services.
Prior to the advent of school choice, the parent of a special ed student either accepted the services their hometown school district offered or hired a lawyer to force the issue.

School choice and charter choice offer parents option
School choice and charter choice now offer a dissatisfied parent the option to shop around to find a school that agrees with the parent’s vision of the child’s IEP. The parent can then “choice” their child to the destination school district, with the entire cost of the child’s special ed services falling on the hometown school district.

Thus, if a DY parent is unhappy with the services the district provides to her child, she can move the child to a more malleable school district and literally send the bill to DY Superintendent Carol Woodbury.

In the case of special education, school choice is a perfect escape hatch for the dissatisfied “customer”.

A New Slant on School Competition?
Sooner or later, some smart Cape school district will zero in on special education as the next school choice opportunity. They will build the best special education program in the county and will start recruiting high need students that will benefit from the services they offer. On that day, the cries about school choice will resonate even louder than the current outcry over charter school “losses”.

If “regular day” education has become a customer-satisfaction-centric experience, special education is an even higher stakes game in the school competition ecosystem. Anecdotally, special ed parents tend to be strong advocates for their children and to have an excellent understanding of available services.

Instead of a school choice kid carrying away a few thousand dollars or a charter school student taking $10,000 out of the district, a single special ed student could easily “choice out” with a six figure bill going back to the hometown district. The destination district is free to focus exclusively on the needs of the special ed child and her parent because they won’t be footing the bill.

Many believe that the only “defense” a hometown school district has against “exsanguination-by-special-ed-choice” is to capitulate to the demands of special ed parents, no matter how costly or capricious.

 

Related Content:

Cape Cod Collaborative gets $10 million a year from Cape Cod schools

Special ed = 1/3 of Nauset's elementary budgets

New "cost-per-student" costs a shocker

What Cape Cod schools pay their teachers

 

 

http://www.capecodtoday.com/article/2014/02/28/24313-cape-special-educations-sobering-numbers

 

 

In case you missed it:

Cape Cod Collaborative gets $10 million a year from Cape Cod schools

$591,900 on administrative expenses, including five high-ticket salaries plus $248,075 of “administrative overhead”

 

Article | Education | February 24, 2014 - 6:00am | By Walter Brooks

The Collaborative’s primary function is to provide special education services for children who cannot be served by their home school district.

Cape Cod Collaborative is paid $10+ million annually by local schools

Collaborative’s primary mission is special education services

The Cape Cod Collaborative collected over $10 million in Fiscal 2013, primarily from tuition and service fees paid by Cape area school districts. The Collaborative’s primary function is to provide special education services for children who cannot be served by their home school district. CCC is a governmental subdivision of its member school districts.

According to the Collaborative’s Fiscal 2013 financial statements it earned $5,147,632 from tuition and $5,142,465 from service fees along with “other” revenue of $205,800.

Over $1/2 million for five top salaries

The organization spent about $591,900 on administrative expenses, including five high-ticket salaries:

• Paul Hilton, Executive Director $134,275
• Lawrence Carroll, Director of Alternative Education Program $103,120
• Anita Woods, Director of the STAR program $100,245
• Jim Brown, Business Manager $92,991
• Susan Greenburg-Carroll – Speech and Language Pathologist $87,873

The financial report does not disclose whether Lawrence Carroll and Susan Greenburg-Carroll are related to one another.

The rest of the administrative expense is classified as $248,075 of “administrative overhead”.

$182,000 in annual rent

Cape Cod Collaborative leases its two facilities. Last year it paid the Town of Barnstable $72,800 for its Osterville campus and $109,200 to the town of Bourne for its campus in that town.

CCC’s single biggest expense category is transportation at $3,555,898. That is followed by alternative education ($2,415,947) and the STAR program for $2,342,972.



http://www.capecodtoday.com/article/2014/02/24/24253-cape-cod-collaborative-gets-10-million-year-cape-cod-schools

 

Paul Hilton: Piled Higher and Deeper

Collaboratives serve an important function in the education of children and provide an important service for the participating school systems.

As such, a strong argument may be made for the importance of preserving the collaborative system with greater state oversight and regulation.

The current shoddy thinking on the part of Paul Hilton is indefensible.

How does Paul Hilton explain all the issues raised in these articles and the comments? Did he even take the time to conduct a google search after being dazzled by Hauser's intellect?

[It's worth reading the informed comments after these articles if you're interested in the topic.] 

 

 

 

Fuzzy thinking such as this has caused our public education to become what it has with those of Paul Hilton's thinking.

 

 

 

 

Marc Hauser's excuse making for faking data

Sep 07 2012 Published by drugmonkey under Scientific Misconduct

From the CHE:

In the statement, Hauser calls the five years of investigation into his research “a long and painful period.” He also acknowledges making mistakes, but seems to blame his actions on being stretched too thin. “I tried to do too much, teaching courses, running a large lab of students, sitting on several editorial boards, directing the Mind, Brain & Behavior Program at Harvard, conducting multiple research collaborations, and writing for the general public,” he writes.

Utterly ridiculous. This is the J.O.B. of an active, scientific research generating, field leading Professor appointed at Harvard and many other Universities.
It is not part of the job to falsify data.

http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2012/09/07/marc-hausers-excuse-making-for-faking-data/

September 7, 2012

Hauser Places Blame for Misconduct, But Not on Himself

Marc Hauser, the former Harvard psychology professor whose career and reputation imploded amid university findings of scientific misconduct, "fabricated data," "falsified coding," "falsely reported...results", and committed other violations, according to a report issued 5 September by the federal Office of Research Integrity. As stated in the report, Hauser "neither admits nor denies" wrongdoing, but "accepts ORI has found evidence of research misconduct."

As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Hauser appears, however, to acknowledge only limited responsibility for the tainted results published under his name. In fact, in a move that highlights the vulnerability of young researchers who work in the labs of unscrupulous senior scientists, Hauser seems to be trying to lay off onto unknown others the blame for actions the ORI report ascribes to him. By way of explaining the situation, he declares in a statement quoted in the Chronicle that "I let important details get away from my control, and as head of the lab, I take responsibility for all errors made in the lab, whether or not I was directly involved."
These so-called "errors" of supposedly uncertain origin occurred because "I tried to do too much, teaching courses, running a large lab of students, sitting on several editorial boards, directing the Mind, Brain & Behavior Program at Harvard, conducting multiple research collaborations, and writing for the general public," he goes on. The arduous duties of a big-time academic apparently led him, the statement seems to imply, to making up or changing data.

Who are the unnamed others purportedly "involved" in the "errors"? Hauser's statement seems to implicate lab members, who would very likely be powerless and dependent "at-will employees and graduate students," in the words of a former research assistant of Hauser's quoted by the Chronicle. Some of them, at great cost to their own careers, brought his wrongdoing to light. All of them, it appears, were at risk of blame they did not deserve from a man whom, in the research assistant's words, "they should have been able to trust."

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2012/09/hauser-places-b.html

 

Wow! Piled Higher and Deeper!

 

There are 217 comments after this editorial offering a biased defense of Marc Hauser by friends. 'colleagues.'

 

There is no indication that Paul Hilton read or considered this information prior to making the poor choice of hiring Marc Hauser.  

 

Who Will Speak for Hauser?

By BERT VAUX and JEFFREY WATUMULL

Published: Tuesday, September 21, 2010

 

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/9/21/hauser-hausers-case-data/

 

 

Cape Cod Collaborative Defends the Indefensible

A simple google search reveals an abundance of information regarding Marc Hauser that Mr. Hilton ignored.

Mr. Hilton's praise of intellect fails to negate shoddy conduct.

This is why greater oversight of collaboratives is necessary.

How many more scandals are necessary before the State acts and heads roll?

Tainted teacher lands new job

By K.C. MYERS

September 10, 2012

 

BOURNE — A former Harvard psychology professor who was found to have falsified some of his research now teaches at-risk youth for the Cape Cod Collaborative.

 

Findings published in the Federal Register on Thursday by the Office of Research Integrity found that Marc Hauser falsified nationally funded research in six instances while working for the university.

 

Hauser, whose Harvard research was the subject of an internal university investigation years before the federal investigation was complete, gave up his tenured teaching position at Harvard University in July 2011, after his colleagues on the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences voted to bar him from his teaching duties, according to the Harvard Crimson.

 

Then, he took a part-time job as an instructional support specialist at Cape Cod Collaborative, which offers various programs for students with emotional, behavioral and intellectual challenges in cooperation with the public schools.

 

"He is very passionate and committed to the students, and he's made a very positive contribution to the students and the staff," said Paul Hilton, executive director of the collaborative.

 

Hauser has authored books and research papers, including his 2006 book published by HarperCollins, "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong." Hauser, 52, taught in the psychology department at Harvard University from 1992 to 2011.

 

In 2011, he began volunteering with at-risk students in grades 5 through 12 at the Collaborative's Alternative Education Program, located at Otis Air National Guard Base.

 

The collaborative's board of directors voted to hire him for 20 hours a week beginning in January and his hours have been increased to nearly full-time, Hilton said.

 

Hauser is one of about 30 staff working with between 60 and 70 students with emotional or behavioral and/or learning disabilities, Hilton added.

 

When hired, Hauser was up-front about the questions regarding his research, the federal investigation, and his reasons for leaving Harvard, Hilton said.

 

"Marc let us know what was happening," Hilton said.

 

But since the collaborative works directly with children and is not involved with research, the investigation was not relevant, Hilton said.

 

Hauser has a Ph.D. but doesn't need any other certification for the duties he performs at the collaborative, Hilton said.

 

The Office of Research Integrity found Hauser engaged in research misconduct in experiments supported by the National Center for Research Resources, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

 

The misconduct involved his research with monkeys in the study of cognition and moral psychology.

Hauser did not admit or deny the misconduct, according to the Federal Register, but he entered into a voluntary settlement agreement to resolve the matter. He agreed to several restrictions for three years, including having any of his U.S. public health service-supported research supervised, and to exclude himself from serving in an advisory capacity on boards or committees involving public health supported services.

 

Hauser, who could not be reached for comment, last week issued a prepared statement to several publications, including the Harvard Crimson.

 

"I tried to do too much, teaching courses, running a large lab of students, sitting on several editorial boards, directing the Mind, Brain and Behavior Program at Harvard, conducting multiple research collaborations, and writing for the general public," he stated in the Crimson. "I let important details get away from my control, and as head of the lab, I take responsibility for all errors made within the lab, whether or not I was directly involved."

 

Hilton called Hauser, "a remarkable intellect" and an "extraordinary individual."

 

"The quality of his work is remarkable," he added.

 

 

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120910/NEWS/209100313