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Report Claims ‘Alarming Lack of Oversight’ of Connecticut Special Ed Schools

Jessika Harkay — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 15:01:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Hundreds of Connecticut special education students who have attended have been subjected to restraints and seclusion, teachers without certification and improper services, according to a scathing report released Tuesday by the Office of the Child Advocate and Disability Rights Connecticut.

In one academic year, there were more than 1,200 reports of students being restrained or secluded in High Road schools, the report states.

Connecticut Child Advocate Sarah Eagan said a two-year investigation of six schools in Hartford, New London, Wallingford and other towns found “an alarming lack of oversight, systemic failings and often flagrant disregard for statutory requirements and state standards that protect the educational rights and safety of children.”

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“Practices routinely fall short of state laws, education regulations, best practices, or all three. Changes need to be put in place without delay,” Eagan said.

High Road is one of the Connecticut’s largest state-approved private special education providers, and it primarily serves children from low-income school districts and receives millions in public funds annually, according to the report.

The 57-page report said the state Department of Education, along with the school districts that sent students to High Road schools, failed to visit the campuses regularly and did not ensure compliance with the federal .

“Many of the students at High Road Schools were grossly underserved both in terms of educational planning and service delivery,” the report said. “The investigation revealed widespread student disengagement and chronic absenteeism across High Road locations, failure to adequately assess and support students’ educational needs through individualized service delivery and perhaps most alarmingly, gross deficiencies in the number of certified special education teachers and other credentialed educational staff working with children and systemic failure to ensure and/or document that staff had undergone employment checks and criminal and child welfare background checks.”

About 316 students were enrolled at six of eight High Road schools in Connecticut during the 2021-22 academic year, with the student body being made up of about 80% boys and 70% students of color from across 38 Connecticut school districts.

Eighty High Road students, or about 25%, were outsourced from Hartford Public Schools, making the capital city’s public school district the “largest district consumer of High Road services,” according to the report.

The state Department of Education said it “vigorously disagree[d] with the conclusions” of the report, adding that the department has been, and is, “attentive to concerns that are brought forth to the State’s attention and engages in off cycle monitoring reviews.”

“During the period of investigation, from 2022 through February 2024, the CSDE received no complaints from parents, from guardians, from students, from attorneys, from parent advocates, or from local or regional school districts regarding High Road schools,” a spokesperson from the department said. “Of note, the CSDE’s Special Education Division annually receives approximately 1,000 filings in the form of hearing requests, mediation requests, or compliance complaints, yet during the period of time covered in the OCA/DRCT Report, not one of those thousands of filings pertained to High Road schools.”

A spokesperson from High Road told The Connecticut Mirror in an emailed statement that the report did “not accurately reflect the academic and behavioral supports at our schools” and that “over the course of two years, High Road Schools provided comprehensive responses that outlined these inaccuracies, as well as highlighted the specific improvements we implemented as part of this process.”

OCA, , and DRCT, , investigated the following campuses: High Road School of Hartford Primary/Middle, High Road School of Hartford High School, High Road B.E.S.T. Academy of Wallingford, High Road School of Fairfield County in Norwalk, High Road School of New London and High Road School of Windham County in Killingly from March 2022 to March 2024 through a series of reviews of educational files, classroom observations and interviews.

DRCT also visited High Road School of Wallingford Primary School and High Road School of Wallingford High School but did not collect data or records, the report states.

Restraint and seclusion

Connecticut leads the country in its placement of students with disabilities in “separate schools,” according to the report.

Most are students of color.

In 2021-22, there were more than 1,200 reported incidents of students being restrained or secluded in High Road schools. Nearly 550 of those incidents were reported from High Road School of Hartford Primary/Middle School, the report states.

“It is concerning that students would be isolated in such a manner and with such frequency. Isolation without adequate and required efforts to address students’ needs also raise serious legal questions under the ADA,” the report said, adding that students were often taken out of classrooms into “time-out rooms” where they weren’t allowed to leave.

Jennifer Hoffman, assistant superintendent for special education and pupil services in Hartford, said responding to the report that the district has worked OCA and DRCT to continue working toward becoming a “trauma-responsive system” and is in “collective acknowledgment that more works needs to be done, between external systems, to reduce the stressors for families that are sending students to school.”

Hoffman’s letter highlighted efforts to expand special education services and monitoring and oversight of students.

The district declined to provide further comment when contacted by the CT Mirror.

Staffing problems

The investigation found that almost half of the teachers employed at High Road did not have adequate teacher certification from the state of Connecticut or did not undergo proper background checks.

The report found that:

“In the Windham County Program, 6 out of 8 educational staff had not had DCF background checks;
In the New London Program, High Road failed to demonstrate that it had verified employment histories, including any concerns of prior student maltreatment, as required by state law;
In the Fairfield County Program, High Road had not conducted a DCF or employee background check for approximately half of the staff;
At Hartford-Primary, High Road had not conducted a DCF background check for approximately half of the staff;
At Wallingford-BEST program, High Road conducted background checks for the majority, but not all of staff working with children.”

The report also said that the Department of Education had previously found that High Road “had not been consistent in conducting background checks” but never followed up.

“State records do not indicate further follow up by CSDE to ensure that corrective actions were implemented and sustained. OCA/DRCT’s investigation found that despite previous complaints, warnings, and directives and despite clear state law obligations and even contractual requirements … High Road failed to demonstrate that it consistently conducts background checks for employees working with children,” the report said.

The report added that school administrators “did not communicate staffing gaps to [local educational agencies]” and that data from both High Road and the state Department of Education “reflect a high vacancy rate for certified special education teachers and lack of adequate documentation for substitute teachers and individuals with ‘durational permits,’” including a “heavy reliance on long-term substitute teachers” who may not be “appropriately credentialed and approved” by the state.

There was also no documentation of physical education, art or music teachers at these schools. Nurses were not employed at all buildings, according to the report.

Lack of individualized programming in the classroom

The report highlighted several deficiencies with student individualized education plans, or IEPs, and a lack of , which are used to determine the cause of certain behaviors and how to address them.

An analysis of 30 student records showed “little evidence … of individualized instruction, and general program descriptions refer only to a curriculum comprised of ‘four instructional rotations during which students are assessed academically, gain self-regulation skills, learn with district-aligned academic curriculums and utilize integrated technology,’” the report said.

“Records examined included inconsistent information, lacked evidence of comprehensive evaluations, individualized or personalized instructional or behavioral strategies, and did not indicate that progress or failure to progress were regularly reviewed within programs. Across sites there was an apparent lack of access to related services such as clinical/psychological consultation or service,” the report continued, adding that several campuses did not have occupational and speech language therapy “consistent with descriptions of students’ previous developmental, social/emotional, or educational histories.”

The investigation also found that “almost none of the students” received functional behavioral assessments (FBAs) or behavior intervention plans (BIPs) at several campuses.

Nor did the schools have a board-certified behavior analyst on staff.

“High Road locations all employ school social workers and offer individual and/or group counseling. However, out of 30 student records reviewed by investigators, there were only two BIPs,” the report said. “Student data and individual student records also indicate frequent use of restraint and seclusion without adequate evaluation and response.”

The report illustrated several instances where students required behavioral help, but there was “little to no individualization.” It also illustrated when student behavioral needs were ignored and played out in the child’s academics later.

“Student A was placed at the Hartford Primary-Middle School program in Grade 3, at age 10, with a BIP created at his previous public school. Yet a program review later that year indicated he was performing below grade level due to a lack of access to education based on extended timeouts, raising questions about the degree to which his BIP was reflective of his current needs,” the report said. “In additional, Student A had multiple absences, slept for the whole day on multiple days waking only to eat lunch, and had significant academic delays. … Complex academic/behavioral/disengagement issues persisted from enrollment at High Road for 7 years without his needs being properly addressed.”

Other examples included a student who had 70 timeouts and seven restraints in her first year at High Road and a student with 69 restraints over a 15-month period and no BIP in his record.

Disengaged students, unclear path forward

Almost 40% of students enrolled at High Road schools had 18 or more absences from school. Over 25% missed over 25 days of instruction, and 10% of all students missed over 50 days, according to the report.

But for students in the classroom, there were several instances where investigators “saw multiple students who were sleeping for prolonged periods during class and students who were completely disengaged from classroom activities.”

“Investigators consistently saw students who were left entirely to themselves during a 30-minute or even 45-minute class period, alone in a cubicle or at a computer, without any or only the briefest of interactions with a teacher or an aide,” the report said.

“During one observation, investigators observed a student sitting in a cubicle starting at the wall. The teacher approached him and spoke to him once during a 45-minute observation. He did not respond and no one else attempted to engage him during class,” the report added. “During an observation at the Fairfield High Road School, several students were observed sleeping, with investigators told that one of the students sleeps all the way up until the last period of the day to participate in science class.”

There were also several issues with progress monitoring and assessments, and inappropriate academic goals, the report said.

“Investigators were told [at the Windham County campus] that students’ progress is monitored daily, but the covering administrator (who was not certified as an administrator) told OCA that ‘students don’t have academic goals; they are here because of behavior,’” the report said.

Beyond academic trouble, the report said, the school did not provide transitional services for older students.

“For older students whose records were reviewed, access to special education until age 22 was terminated without clear transition plans or individualized programs that would provide options for post-secondary education or realistic development of vocational options and experiences, with appropriate social and mental health supports that could lead to successful transitions to adult life.”

Leadership failure and policy recommendations

OCA and DRCT criticized both the state Department of Education and local districts’ efforts to protect the students with disabilities enrolled in High Road schools.

The report said one district’s director of public services “had positive things to say about High Road schools and expressed no concerns” with High Road and that “other programs are worse.” He said there were no red flags around service hours.

However, investigators said that district had 13 students enrolled in High Road programs, and five students missed a combined 306 days of instruction without a BIP in place.

“Although certain districts indicated they conducted site visits and records review following the letter, the incongruity between the districts’ stated satisfaction with the provision of services and OCA/DRCT investigative findings regarding staffing irregularities, lack of background checking, inadequate records, lack of related service delivery and individualized behavioral intervention plans, and chronic absenteeism is difficult to reconcile,” the report said.

The investigation found that many districts across the state did not conduct site visits and did not ask substantial questions about services or staffing.

“In response to questions about whether the districts conducted any observations of its students enrolled at the schools, only 3/18 districts responded affirmatively,” the report said. “Most districts were unable to provide the ‘names, positions, qualifications and/or any certification of all personnel providing instruction, including special education and related services, to the students while attending High Road.’ One district maintained that CSDE is responsible for ensuring that High Road schools have qualified staff employed.”

At a state level, the report said, the Department of Education had concerns about background checking and inadequate student records, but there were no findings of follow-ups or corrective action.

The report said the state Department of Education did not properly monitor and ensure compliance with federal and state law.

The final pages of the report recommended that state law be amended to “require strengthened CSDE oversight of state-approved private special education programs” and mandate transparency from the education department’s monitoring and enforcement of federal law.

This story was originally published on CT Mirror.

Wizard Chess, Robot Bikes and More: Six Students Creating Cool Stuff with AI

Greg Toppo — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 15:30:00 +0000

More than a year after ’s surprise launch thrust artificial intelligence into public view, many educators and policymakers still fear that students will primarily use the technology for cheating. An found that two-thirds of high school and college instructors are so concerned about AI they’re rethinking assignments, with many planning to require handwritten assignments, in-class writing or even oral exams.

But a few students see things differently. They’re not only fearless about AI, they’re building their studies and future professional lives around it. While many of their teachers are scrambling to outsmart AI in the classroom, these students are embracing the technology, often spending hours at home, in classrooms and dorm rooms building tools they hope will launch their careers.

In a , ACT, the non-profit that runs the college entrance exam of the same name, found that nearly half of high school students who’d signed up for the June 2023 exam had used AI tools, most commonly ChatGPT. Almost half of those who had used such tools relied on them for school assignments.

�� went looking for young people diving head-first into AI and found several doing substantial research and development as early as high school.

The six students we found, a few as young as 15, are thinking much more deeply about AI than most adults, their hands in the technology in ways that would have seemed impossible just a generation ago. Many are immigrants to the West or come from families that emigrated here. Edtech podcaster Alex Sarlin, who also writes a newsletter focused on edtech and founded the consultancy , ��’t surprised by the demographics. He explained that while U.S. companies typically make headlines in AI, the phenomenon has “truly been a product of global collaboration, and many of its major innovators have been immigrants,” often with training and professorships at top North American universities.

These young people are programming everything from autonomous bicycles to postpartum depression apps for new mothers to 911 chatbots, homework helpers and Harry Potter-inspired robotic chess boards.

All have a clear message about AI: Don’t fear it. Learn about it.

Isabela Ferrer

Age 17

Hometown Bogota, Colombia

School MAST Academy, Miami, Fla.

What she’s working on: A high school junior at MAST, a public magnet high school focused on maritime studies and science, Ferrer plans to return to Colombia this spring and study computer science in college. She has been working with a foundation called that takes in abandoned and abused children in her home country. She’s developing an AI tool to help the children learn how to read and write Spanish more easily.

“They enter a public school system that expects them to know how to read, but they don’t have these skills,” she said.

Ferrer is also considering adding more features in the future, such as one that uses AI voice recognition to identify trauma in a student’s voice.

Once she graduates, she’d like to take a gap year to “get a little more involved in the Colombian startup ecosystem and culture. I also want to travel internationally and possibly keep working on projects like the one I’m working on right now, but on an international scale.”

What most people misunderstand about AI: “Something I think most people don’t get about AI is that it’s very accessible to everyone,” Ferrer said. “Coding API [application programming interface, which allows two applications to talk to each other] and creating AI models for any specific purpose is very easy and, if done correctly, can be beneficial for different purposes.”

All the same, she also worries that AI is often used to tackle “very superficial problems” like productivity or data processing. “But I think there’s a huge opportunity to use these technologies to solve real problems in the world … There’s a huge opportunity to close different gaps that exist in emerging markets and in developing countries. And it’s very worth exploring.”

Shanzeh Haji

Age 16

Hometown Toronto, Canada

School Bayview Secondary School, Richmond Hill, Ontario

Once she learned about postpartum depression, Haji began talking to new mothers and family members, including her own mother, who had experienced it. “I realized how big the problem was and how closely connected I was to it.” Haji finished coding the AI chatbot for the as-yet unnamed app and is working on the symptom recognition platform.

What most people misunderstand about AI: “If you look at some of the people who are working in AI and some of the significant impact that AI has made on so many different problems,” she said, “whether it be climate change or medicine or drug discovery, you can just see that AI has significant potential — it can literally transform our lives in a positive way. It really allows for this radical innovation. And I feel like people see more of the negative side of artificial intelligence rather than the positive and the significance that it has on our lives.”

Aditya Syam

Age 20

Hometown Mumbai, India

School Cornell University

What he’s working on: A math and computer science double major, Syam is part of a longstanding team at Cornell that is developing an AI-powered, self-navigating, , basically a robot bike. “The kinds of applications we are thinking of for this are deliveries and basically just getting things from point A to point B without having a human intervene at any point,” he said. Syam, who is working on the bike’s navigation team, has been honing its obstacle avoidance algorithm, which keeps it from hitting things.

The project began about a decade ago, he said. “Back then, it was just a theory.” Now they plan to showcase an actual prototype of the bike this spring, probably in March or April, so everyone who has contributed to the project “can see what we’ve built.”

What most people misunderstand about AI: “It’s technology that’s been around for decades,” he said. “It’s just been rebranded in a different way.” ChatGPT, for instance, combines Natural Language Processing and Web access, which results in a kind of “miracle” product. “It seems so great — it can just pull something off the web for you, it can write essays for you, it can edit software code for you. But in its essence, it’s not that different from technologies that have been around before.”

Vinitha Marupeddi

Age 21

Hometown San Jose, Calif.

School Purdue University

What she’s working on: A senior studying computer science, data science and applied statistics, Marupeddi recently led two student teams — one in voice recognition and another in computer vision — developing a robotic, voice-activated modeled after , the 3-D animated game in the Harry Potter books in which the pieces come to life. “We were able to do a lot of high-level robotics using that one project, so I thought that was very cool,” she said. Though the game is still far from being playable, Marupeddi calls it a good use case “to get people interested in robotics and machine learning.”

Last summer, she interned at a John Deere warehouse in Moline, Ill., where she was set free to work on any project that struck her fancy. Marupeddi looked around the warehouse and saw that Deere had a robot that was being used to track inventory, so she expanded its abilities to cover a wider area. She also worked on a computer vision algorithm that used security camera footage to detect how full certain areas of the warehouse were and determine how much more inventory they could hold.

What most people misunderstand about AI: ”Honestly, I think a good chunk of people are just obsessed with the cheating part of it. They’re like, ‘Oh, ChatGPT can just write my essay. It can do my homework. I don’t have to worry about it.’ But they don’t try to actually understand the material. The people that do use ChatGPT to understand the material are actually going to use it as tutors or use it to ask questions if they don’t understand something.” That divide, between those who reject AI and those who learn how to control it, could grow larger if unaddressed. But learning about AI, she said, will “give people the resources, if they have the drive.”

Vinaya Sharma

Age 18

Hometown Toronto, Canada

School Castlebrooke Secondary School, Brampton, Ontario

What she’s working on: Actually, the better question might be: What ��’t she working on? Sharma, a high school senior, writes code like most of us speak. In part, her work is a response to how little challenge she gets in school these days. “After COVID, I feel schools have gone easier on students,” she said. “I skip school as much as I can so I can code in my room.” The result has been a flurry of applications, from an AI-powered chatbot to handle 911 calls to a power grid simulator to a pharmaceutical app to aid in drug discovery.

The is still in search of customers, she said, but would be valuable especially in cases where multiple people are calling about the same emergency, such as a car crash. The AI would geolocate the calls and determine if callers were using similar words to describe what they saw. To those who balk at talking to a 911 chatbot, Sharma said the current system in Toronto is often backed up. “It’ll be 100% better than being put on hold and no one assisting you at all.”

The idea was born after she began talking to engineers and energy policymakers and realized that, in her words, “The engineers were very technical, looking at things on a scale of voltages and currents. And the policymakers had trouble communicating with these grid engineers. And I realized that that was one of the bottlenecks slowing down the process so much.” She used design principles pioneered by one of her favorite video games, , to give the two groups a drag-and-drop simulation that both could understand.

Sharma got interested in drug discovery that Lululemon founder Chip Wilson has a rare form of muscular dystrophy that makes it difficult to walk. He’s investing $100 million on treatments and research for a cure. Sharma said she “fell down a research rabbit hole” and soon realized that the drug discovery process “is honestly broken. It takes more than a decade to bring a drug to market, and it costs, on average, $1 billion to $2 billion,” or about $743 million to nearly $1.5 billion in U.S. dollars.

Her app, BioBytes, aims to bring down both the cost and time needed to bring drugs to market.

What most people misunderstand about AI: “With any new emerging tech, there’s going to be bad actors that will abuse the system or use it for harm,” she said. “But personally I believe the pros outweigh it. Instead of taking these tools away from us in order to prevent these bad things from happening, I think that people need to realize that the tools are here and people are going to use them. So there needs to be a greater focus on education, of how to use the tools and how to use [them] for good and how it can actually support us.”

Krishiv Thakuria

Age 15

Hometown Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

School The Woodlands Secondary School, Mississauga

What he’s working on: Thakuria founded a startup called and is building a set of AI-powered learning tools to help students study more efficiently. The tools let users upload any class materials — study notes, a PDF of a textbook chapter or entire novel or even a teacher’s PowerPoint. From there they can create “an infinite set of practice questions” keyed to the course, Thakuria said. If students get stuck, they can click on an AI tutor customized to the material they uploaded.

The tutoring function is similar to Khan Academy’s AI-powered teaching assistant , but Thakuria said Aceflow’s tool has an advantage: Khanmigo only works, for now, on Khan Academy materials. “In a lot of classes, teachers teach content in very different ways,” he said. “If you can personalize an AI tool to study the material of your teachers, you get learning that’s far more personalized and far more relevant to you, making your studying sessions more effective.” Aceflow users can also create timed study sessions, something neither Khanmigo nor ChatGPT users can currently do.

The new tool is being beta-tested by a focus group of 20, with a 1,400-person waitlist, he said. He and his partners plan to offer it on a “freemium” model, with charges for premium features. Even paying a small amount for unlimited use of the tool makes it available to many families who can’t afford a tutor, Thakuria said, since private tutoring can cost upwards of $10,000 a year.

What most people misunderstand about AI: That its impact on education will be “binary,” he said. People believe “it’s either a good thing or a bad thing. I think that it can do both. For all the people who worry about AI being a bad thing, I would argue that, well, a hammer can be a bad thing when you give your kid a hammer for the first time to help you out with carpentry work. You have to teach your kid how to use it, right? And without teaching your kid how to use a tool, the tool is not going to be used properly, and that hammer is going to break something.”

It’s the same with AI. “If we can teach kids that smoking is bad for the body, we should teach kids that using AI in certain ways is bad for the brain. But we shouldn’t just focus on the negative effects, because then we’re closing off a future of using AI to solve educational inequity in so many beautiful ways. AI is a technology that can help us scale private tutoring to far more families than can actually afford it now. I think no one should underestimate the positive effects of AI while also safeguarding [against] the negative effects, because two things can be true at once.”