Special ed report outlines needed Scotts Valley changes

Scotts Valley Unified School District has received a long-awaited report from the state that details what it must do to comply with national special-education requirements, including added paperwork and “minor” changes.
The report shows 62 students whose Individualized Education Plans were not compliant with federal law — but 47 of those reports were within 95 percent compliance, according to Gerri Fippen, the district’s director of student services, who oversees special education in the district.
Federal law changed last year so that IEPs must be 100 percent compliant with federal guidelines, as opposed to 95 percent before, Fippen said.
“We are one of the first districts in the area to be under the scrutiny of 100 percent compliance,” Fippen said.
In late 2010, Scotts Valley was selected as one of two districts in the county to undergo a Special Education Verification Review. Investigators from the California Department of Education spent several weeks thoroughly examining the district’s special-education reports and practices.
Fippen characterized the state’s findings as “a lot of minor things.”
“Yes, there are some things to work on,” Fippen said. “We are also doing a lot right.”
She said the state collected 80 files and went through parts of 50 others. Each file contains the IEP of a student in the district. The district has about 330 IEPs on file, Fippen said.
She said the state found four or five patterns related to noncompliance with federal law. Those are things she will work with her staff to mend through professional development for teachers and administrators, she said. To correct individual IEPs, district staff will talk with families to make sure each plan is in line with federal law.
Some of the changes require more paperwork for teachers, which Fippen said becomes a catch-22, because it will mean less time actually teaching.
Overall, however, she said changes and improvements in the past year made it so the district came out as good as it did in the report.
“It’s always great to have an outside eye,” Fippen said. “It makes us a little bit more prepared.”
State investigators will return in six months to pull 20 more files to see if the problems they found have been corrected.