Editorial
No time to relax on Felix obligation
We greet with mixed feelings federal Judge David Ezra's decision not to appoint a receiver over the state's special education system.
The good news, reports Advertiser education writer Jennifer Hiller, is that the federal court acknowledges that the state has dramatically improved services and come very close to meeting expectations of federal law and its obligations under the consent decree.
That's a tremendous achievement; indeed, we wonder how many states can say as much.
But the effort is far from complete.
As plaintiffs' attorneys point out, for instance, the Department of Education has fallen behind in hiring and retaining certified special-ed teachers. While the state has met Ezra's deadline of having 27 complexes — high schools and their feeder schools — in compliance by Nov. 1, 13 complexes are not yet even in provisional compliance.
By March 31, they must be, or the receivership question reappears.
In other words, we're not yet off the hook.
But in one sense, we share interim schools superintendent Patricia Hamamoto's satisfaction in seeing the schools move toward a position of greater independence and self-oversight. After years of unconscionable balking, the education system appears genuinely to have shouldered responsibility for special education.
In another sense, however, we worry a lot about the day when the federal court stops overseeing the special-ed system.
The courts have ended their oversight of the State Hospital at Kane'ohe and two state prison facilities, and it's clear they still suffer from some of the same problems that brought them before the federal courts in the first place.
We worry, in other words, that given half a chance, the state has shown a tendency to let its obligations to some of our most powerless and vulnerable citizens slide alarmingly.
We continue to wonder, for instance, whether state lawmakers now investigating the Felix effort are trying to make it more accountable even as they properly lend it full support, or whether they want to find a way around the obligation imposed by federal law as interpreted by Judge Ezra.
Ezra himself has made no bones that it had better be the former rather than the latter. He warned lawmakers not to take his decision not to impose receivership as a sign that it can scale back special-education funding.
There are many reasons to be resentful at being taken to task by a federal judge on this subject. The most legitimate is that it's what has come to be known as an unfunded federal mandate.
That is, when Congress required public schools to provide education to students with disabilities 25 years ago, the federal government promised to pick up 40 percent of the tab.
This year the federal government provided about 16 percent. States and school districts thus share a much larger burden.
At week's end in Washington, D.C., House-Senate conferees stripped from their education bill a proposal that would have guaranteed steadily increased spending for each of the next six years for special education — which would have been welcome relief to a Hawai'i effort that now costs $300 million a year.
The Senate proposal would have spent $8.8 billion next year, with funding reaching $21 billion by 2007. The House proposes a much smaller increase for next year.
Another reason, perhaps, for states to balk at fully funding the special-education mandate is that the Individuals with Disabilities Act comes up for reauthorization next year. There seems little chance, however, that Congress might let the law lapse.
All of this ensures that none of the states, including Hawai'i, will have an easy time of providing for the needs of special-ed students. The bottom line, however, is that it remains the right thing to do.
