While parents are distracted by the COVID crisis, Chesterfield County Public Schools’ Superintendent Merv Daugherty is quietly planning to eliminate almost all special education catchment programs in our public schools. The elimination plan begins in the coming school year (“CCPS Memorandum” dated 4/14/2020, attached below).

Programs Daugherty plans to dissolve include programs for students with:

• Mild Intellectual Disabilities
• Moderate Intellectual Disabilities
• SOL Autism (for students on a regular diploma track)
• ASOL Autism (for students on a special diploma track)

Approximately 1,200 students with disabilities would be phased out of these programs and eventually sent back to their home schools. This would occur  without creating programs at each school that provide the same quality of services the catchment programs provide. Not all students with disabilities attend catchment programs. These programs are for students with intense and specific disability-related needs, students who need teachers who specialize in a specific disability, and students who need very intensive interventions.

Currently, depending on the program and the students’ level of need, CCPS’s specialized catchment programs have classes with 6-8 students with similar disability-related and learning needs. These students are supported by one teacher and typically two (or more) instructional assistants. Students come from several local schools to attend these specialized programs.

Superintendent Daugherty’s plan would place these students at their home schools in a classroom with 10 students--students with all sorts of disabilities and learning needs--and they would be taught by one teacher and only one instructional assistant.

Here’s the thing about multi-disability classes. You may have one student in the class who is nonverbal and working on identifying colors or basic communication. Meanwhile, another student in the class could be fully verbal and learning things like composing a two-paragraph paper and double-digit addition. There would also be 8 other students with 8 completely different kinds of disability and learning needs. One teacher and one instructional assistant would somehow miraculously be expected to provide quality specialized instruction in all these areas at the same time in the same classroom.

Schools already have these types of multi-disability classes, and they work for students with milder disabilities and less intense learning needs. These kinds of classes don’t work for students who are now in catchment programs, which is why the students went to the catchment programs to begin with.

$$$ Why are they doing this? $$$

It all comes down to money, and it's disgraceful that they would try to balance the budget on the backs of students with disabilities. (I'll explain this in further detail below.)

The School Board is already reviewing Dr. Daugherty’s recommendations. We need to act now to protect these students!

What can we do to help? 

We need everyone---parents, students, and concerned members of the community--to contact the Superintendent, members of the School Board, and the Director of Special Education by email and by phone as quickly as possible. If your child is in one of these catchment programs, contact your principal and your child’s case manager immediately to express your concerns, and let other parents know what's going on.

Contact Information for Emails and Phone Calls: 

• Superintendent Merv Daugherty, 804-748-1434, Merv_Daugherty@ccpsnet.net
• Director of SPED, Diane Glover, 804-639-8918, Diane_Glover@ccpsnet.net

School Board Members:

• Debbie Bailey, Dale District: 804-543-6780,  dg_bailey@ccpsnet.net 
• Dot Heffron, Clover Hill District: 804-543-9161, dl_heffron@ccpsnet.net
• Ann Coker, Bermuda District: 804-543-7407, ac_coker@ccpsnet.net
• Ryan Harter, Matoaca District: 804-543-7992, rm_harter@ccpsnet.net
• Kathryn Haines, Midlothian District: 804-543-7948, ks_haines@ccpsnet.net

We also need people to sign up to speak virtually at the upcoming School Board meeting on Tuesday, June 9, 2020.

Link to Sign Up to Speak at the School Board Meeting

If you'd like a more detailed explanation of what's going on, keep reading.

What is a catchment program and how does it help students with disabilities? 

All of our schools provide special education to students with disabilities, and most students with disabilities do well at their home schools. However, there are some students with disabilities who  require more specialized support than their home schools can provide. An example would be a child with autism who isn't learning with the special education services available at his home school no matter how many interventions they try.  In order to help the child learn, the home school and the parent may choose to move him to an specialized autism program at another school that provides more intensive supports by teachers who specialize in autism.

It’s kind of like how we go to primary care doctors for most health issues, but when we have something complicated going on, those doctors refer us to specialists so that we can get the appropriate care we require. That’s what the catchment programs do.

CCPS currently provides intensely specialized support for students who need it through catchment programs. Not every school has every program, so sometimes kids go to a school that isn’t their home school. Catchment programs have teachers and instructional assistants who have been thoroughly trained in how to meet their students’ unique disability-related needs. These teachers are able to hone their practice because their sole focus is on students with similar disabilities and the same kinds of needs. In short, these teachers are specialists, like the specialists in the healthcare field.  The teachers and aides work only with students in their catchment program, and the ratio of students to teachers is kept small to enable the teachers to meet each child’s intensive disability-related needs. 

The design of the catchment programs is what makes them work.  But Dr. Daugherty’s plan would quietly and slowly send all students back to their home schools, to the same kinds of multi-disability classes that already failed to meet their needs.

What would change? 

Superintendent Daugherty says in his memo that catchment programs should “no longer be considered programs, but rightfully identified as a class(es).” The change from a “program” to a “class” sounds small, but it isn’t.

Right now, a typical student in a middle school SOL Autism Catchment Program receives support from teachers and aides in the catchment program throughout the entire school day in various mainstream classes, electives, and Health & PE. If the catchment program is eliminated, that student would be moved to their home school and placed in mainstream collaborative classes with various special education teachers, many of whom do not specialize in autism, and who serve a much greater number of students with all sorts of disabilities. The home school and its delivery model couldn’t meet the student’s needs to begin with, but that’s what we would go back to.

This change would be implemented slowly. A child in an ASOL Autism program in elementary school would stay there through 5th grade, but the program would slowly change to be more and more like the model Daugherty is proposing. Then, instead of going to the ASOL Autism middle school program, parents would be told that their home middle school has an ASOL Autism “class,” so there’s no need to go to the catchment program. Except that the ASOL Autism “class” and the “Mild Intellectual Disabilities “class” might be combined into the same classroom with only one teacher and one instructional assistant, so while it might look okay on paper, it would be profoundly different from the type of education the student received in the catchment program.

For middle and high school students who are mainstreamed for much of the day, the “SOL Autism class” and the “Mild Intellectual Disabilities class” would be like an elective--something the student attends for one or two class periods a day. It also wouldn’t be the Autism teacher or the  Mild Intellectual Disabilities teacher working with them in their mainstream classes. Instead, ‘general practitioner’ collaborative special education teachers would be expected to provide the same level and intensity of specialized support that catchment program teachers provide under the current model while also providing support to all the other students with disabilities in the classroom. This would double the work of the collaborative teacher.

$$$ So again, why are they doing this? $$$

CCPS wants us to think that eliminating catchment programs is about “inclusion” and keeping kids at their home schools. If they were re-creating these programs at each school, keeping all essential elements the same, keeping the same high degree of staffing, and placing students in a class with a teacher who specializes in their disability, CCPS’s argument might be believable. But Superintendent Daugherty and Glover have no plan to recreate these specialized programs at each school. Instead, they appear to be trying to warehouse high-need students in multi-disability, unspecialized classrooms with fewer teachers and fewer instructional assistants. 

While dissolving our specialized catchment programs, Chesterfield is also making deep cuts to the number of instructional assistants in our schools. Any teacher would tell you that trained, caring instructional assistants are essential in special education because so many students with disabilities need one-on-one or very small group instruction to learn. By slashing the number of instructional assistants, there won’t be enough staff to teach our most vulnerable children.

In addition to saving money by cutting staff, Chesterfield would also save a lot of money on transportation because they wouldn’t have to transport students to catchment program schools.

It’s hard to believe this change is about anything but money. Except in the long run, it would end up costing more.   

Here’s why this wouldn’t save the county any money at all:

Without these catchment programs, students with intense disability-related needs will no longer get the support they need, and because of that, they will have to be sent to a private special education school, which by law, the county will have to pay for. That’s exactly what happened before these programs were created. The private special education schools cost upwards of $70,000 per student per year, not even including the cost to transport students. 

The county will save money in the short term by eliminating catchment programs, but in the long run, we taxpayers will end up having to pay quite a bit more money.

There's also a potential legal issue.

Students have been placed in these programs through their IEPs. An IEP is a legally-binding document, and these programs are the “educational placements” for students in these programs. 

According to the “Regulations Governing Special Education,” an “educational placement means the overall instructional setting in which the  student  receives his  education  including  the  special  education  and  related  services” and “parental consent must be given before the school can change a child’s educational placement.” 

The changes the Superintendent has proposed would radically alter our students’ “overall instructional setting” and drastically change the type of services students receive. Dr. Daughetry appears to be trying to get around the law by claiming in his memo that these programs never existed and that the programs were really just “class(es)” all along. Who knows if that would hold up in court?

Bottom line:

If CCPS wants to fundamentally alter the nature of special education programs in Chesterfield, they should do it transparently by fully and honestly informing parents, teachers, and students of what these changes would look like, and parents should be fully and truthfully informed of exactly how their child’s “educational setting” will change prior to being asked to sign an IEP. CCPS should also get parent, teacher, student, and community input before making any overall changes to special education.

For your reference:

Memorandum dated 4/14/2020​

Attachment to the Memorandum​

Link to School Board Meeting Video on 4/14/2020

Photo credit: Creative Commons,​ PresidenciaRD

**The information in this document was compiled from public documents, personal communication with the school system, and off-the-record conversations with teachers and school staff. The conclusions drawn are my own. While derived from facts, this document is my own opinion. I encourage you to reach out to your case managers, teachers, principals, and CCPS staff, as well as the special education director, superintendent, and School Board members to get more information.