California charter schools are systematically leaving disabled kids behind—or worse. A recent report from United Teachers Los Angeles and the California Teachers Association looks at three large school districts, finding that charter schools in all three are enrolling fewer students with disabilities, and especially fewer students with moderate to severe disabilities, than local public schools. And some of the ways charter schools are excluding and forcing out kids with disabilities are downright abusive.
The report looks at Los Angeles, San Diego, and Oakland. In Oakland, 13.58% of the students in district schools have disabilities, while just 7.67% of charter school students have disabilities. In San Diego, it’s 15.07% to 12.96%, and in Los Angeles, it’s 14.16% to 11.11%. For kids with moderate to severe disabilities—autism, intellectual disability, orthopedic impairment—the gap is even bigger.
Those gaps mean that not only are charter schools abdicating responsibility for kids who deserve an education just as every other kid does, but they leave a gap in public school budgets—charter schools are siphoning off money from those budgets to begin with, and they’re doing it while refusing to educate the kids who need more support and can be the most costly and challenging to teach.
If you look only at the overall disparity in enrollment of any students with disabilities, this is costing San Diego schools $5.1 million, Oakland schools $9.33 million, and Los Angeles schools $50.09 million. If you take the severity of the disabilities into account, those numbers jump to $12.49 million in San Diego, $10.1 million in Oakland, and $74.65 million in Los Angeles. Bear in mind that Oakland and Los Angeles teachers have been out on strike this year over funding issues.
But as gross as it is that charter schools aren’t educating the highest-needs kids and that this refusal is impacting all the kids in the public schools in these cities, it gets worse. Because all too often the way a charter school excludes a student with disabilities is by mistreating them until they leave. Vanessa Aguirre tried to keep up with her daughter Isabel’s assignments and needs, only to have staff repeatedly schedule meetings with her and then tell her—the day before the scheduled meeting—that she’d missed it and they’d be putting a letter in Isabel’s file. When Vanessa finally learned how to log on to an assignments portal, she was able to help Isabel make progress—for a few days, until a staffer changed the password and locked them out. That was all the precursor to the special education staff telling Vanessa that the school simply couldn’t handle Isabel’s disability. This is a cruel way to treat a child, and it’s not an isolated case. Nereyda Bautista’s autistic daughter was “regularly separated from the other students and taken to sit in the school’s main office until the end of each day. There, she was left alone to entertain herself with colored pencils and paper.” She was in kindergarten at the time.