The State Department of Education has issued an "Amended Order" to its findings in the matter of the TAG complaint against PPS.
For those of you who are new to the story, a complaint was filed with the Superintendent of Public Instruction in the State Department of Education in 1997. The fall of the following school year, the State carried out an investigation and it issued a "Finding" that the District was not in compliance with the TAG mandate on February 13th, 1998.
The State gave the district a fixed amount of time (subsequently extended) to come into compliance with the mandate.
In the fall of 2000, the Department carried out a second investigation to determine whether the District had met the requirements of its Order. The Department issued a second set of "Findings" concerning the District's implementation of its Corrective Action Plan on August 11, 2000. This second "Findings" reported that the district had made improvements but still was not in full compliance with the original Order. It required a further set of actions by the district to reach compliance.
In October, 2000 Amy Welch, the TAG administrator for the District sent a letter to the State stating that the District would not be able to meet all the requirements of the second "Findings" because some of them conflicted with language in the District's contract with P.A.T.
For reasons I cannot fathom, the State failed to respond to Amy's letter for seven months, but has now issued its reply, which I received yesterday.
The original complaint was dated 3/14/1997. Our TAG children have now spent FOUR YEARS in schools that were found by the State to be deficient in meeting their needs in 1997 and are still found by the State to be deficient today.
The entire text of the most recent letter is below.
----------Margaret DeLacy
The Superintendent of Public Instruction declares the District to be conditionally standard based on the following plan of correction. Upon completion of the plan, the District will be considered standard. The District shall:
(a) provide extended professional development opportunities to assist supervisors in evaluating and implementing appropriate classroom services for gifted students.
(b) document how each building and classroom provides appropriate services including appropriate assessed levels of learning and accelerated rates of learning for identified TAG students.
(c) submit to the Department within 30 days after acceptance of the revised Findings and Order, an implementation calendar with formal evaluation procedures with corrective actions to be taken, and
(d) notify the Department by May 1, 2002, that all teachers assigned to classrooms that include academically talented and/or intellectually gifted students have been assessed on their implementation of appropriate instructional practices for academically talented and/or intellectually gifted students, including instruction matched to individual TAG students' assessed rates and levels of learning.
Oregon Department of Education staff is available for technical assistance in any of the identified areas. Corrective actions must be completed prior to the beginning of the 2002-2003 school year. The Department will conduct a follow-up visit to verify completion of the plan of correction by June 1, 2002.
Dated this 12th. day of March 2001.
[signed] C. Gregory McMurdo
Executive Legal Officer.