Doomsday at APS

I want you to remember one thing before you read this post: remember the date you saw it. Right now, it's early 2011, and there's still time to stop this catastrophe from happening. When it does happen, all sorts of people (including our BOE, and our new superintendent) will wail about the suddenness of it, the unfairness of it, the tragedy of it.

But because none of the people in power at APS are doing anything about it now, the outcome predicted here is (in my mind) an inevitability. So I don't want to hear any of those gutless, infighting, scandal-plagued poseurs whine about it when that day comes.

One last thing: in the microscopically improbable chance that I'm wrong about this, I will not only publicly apologize on this blog, I will write personal emails to all the people I am about to embarrass here, apologizing to them personally. I might just as well pledge to send them each a check for $1,000, made out to their favorite charity. I'm that confident.

Here's what's going to happen.

The Atlanta Public Schools special-ed program known as the Program for Exceptional Children (full disclosure: our family has sued the PEC and had what we consider to be a wholly successful outcome) is about to lose its eligibility for federal funding. The district doesn't disclose how much special-ed funding it receives from the feds, but it is in the many millions of dollars per year--enough to fund arts classes, music programs, field trips....remember that, as you read on.

The PEC has either this year or this year plus one more year (this audit of the program fails to specify whether it's the former or the latter, but concedes it is at most a two-year period ending in 2012) to get its act together. (If you are not aware of the disastrously poor performance of the PEC, read down on this blog and you'll get the drift).

So, fine. We have time to fix things. That's what most people would conclude.

But here's the problem: the only way to fix the program is to fire some people, and the guy in charge won't fire them.

The PEC is made up of people. The only way to make the program better is to either change the personnel and get better people, or convince the current people that they should do their jobs better. (I hate to oversimplify the issue this way, because there are some very nice and competent people in the PEC, but they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the incompetent, racist fools on the staff).

You cannot reform this program and comply with federal law by writing some memos, implementing new rules and expecting your current shoddy workforce to suddenly wake up and decide they want to do things right. If it were possible to effect change via lawsuit, then extremely costly lawsuits like ours would have already done that. But APS has a curious business model for the PEC which is based, as far as our family could tell, on nothing more tangible than hope: the hope that more families won't sue like we did.

Hope is a fine quality; heck, we elected a president on it. But it is not a very good business model.

No, to reform the PEC you will have to change out the people who have failed the special-needs families of the Atlanta Public School system for oh-so-long. And the job of doing that falls to former middle-school principal Aaron Fernander, who spent time as a special-ed teacher before becoming a principal, but who never in his life expected to have to reform a deeply dysfunctional, legally complex system like APS special-ed. With all due respect to Fernander, who's actually a pretty nice guy, he's got no shot. Zero.

The reason? The last time he tried to fire a female employee, he screwed it up and got himself and the district sued. The Board of Education approved a $97,000 settlement to make the lawsuit go away.

Now, first of all, who pays $97,000 to avoid the cost of litigation? You can damn well litigate a case for under $100,000 if you didn't screw up.

But if you did screw up, and you got your ass sued, and the district had to pay nearly six figures to bail you out, how the hell do you get yourself promoted, the very next year, to a position of critical importance in APS, and where you will routinely have to make tough calls on personnel?

And yet, that is the legacy Beverly Hall is leaving us: not just the worst cheating scandal in the history of standardized testing, but a school-district hierarchy riddled with questionable hires.

So now we must ask ourselves a pretty obvious question: can we expect a guy who got himself sued last time he bungled an HR issue with a female employee to actually fire the middle-aged (and older) female employees who run the PEC? (Because they are all--and I mean all--middle-aged and older females).

Of course he's not going to fire them. He's going to stay as far away from employee terminations as he can for the remainder of his career.

So the APS will make rearrange the deck chairs on this Titanic, and when it goes down, as it inevitably will, the district will have to take millions of dollars from mainstream programs and divert it to special ed (because APS will still have to follow federal special-ed laws no matter what).

And when that day comes, Aaron Fernander (if he has any spine at all) and our new superintendent of schools will stand in front of the microphones and look really sorry about how all of this has played out, and announce dramatic cutbacks in mainstream programs.

If you are standing in a tunnel and a freight train is barreling at you at 100mph, it is not going out on a limb for you to predict that you're about to get squashed. The laws of inertia are not going to suddenly disappear because you really really want them to and you pledge to try harder and be smarter next time.

So it will be this time. There's no cavalry coming for the PEC, nobody to stop the program from going right over the cliff. The problem is, when the PEC crashes, we all go with it.

Remember the day you read this.