PROVIDENCE – A Superior Court judge ruled Thursday the Council of Elementary and Secondary Education and the state Department of Education violated the rights of students who were English-language learners by providing them less support than the law requires.
In 2016, attorneys for Rhode Island Legal Services and the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island filed a complaint with the R.I. Department of Education on behalf of parents of English learners in Providence whose children had been provided with few or no direct services by a certified English-learner teacher.
The Providence School District claimed students were being adequately served by educators who consulted with an English-learner-certified teacher once every two months and for no specified amount of time.
The complaint argued that this “consultation model” was inadequate under state regulations, and that it discriminated against children with disabilities by denying them even the less-than-adequate services provided to students without disabilities.
In a court brief, the RILS and ACLU argued that by “inviting untrained general or special educators to provide specialized language instruction they have not been prepared to provide, the decision of the council effectively demolishes the entire state regulatory scheme intended to ensure the quality of EL services. In fact, it opens a loophole that swallows the entire quality assurance scheme of Rhode Island’s regulations.”
Judge Netti Vogel ruled Thursday the school district had “violated the clear and unambiguous language” of state regulations by “fail[ing] to respect the rights of [affected learners] to receive special education so as to ensure that the students’ educational needs are met on a basis equal to that provided to other students’ and failed to ensure that programs for English-language learners are based on sound educational theory and appropriately supported, with adequate and effective staff and resources, so that the program may reasonably be expected to be successful.”
Vogel ordered the school district to consider what compensatory services the students are owed and left open the possibility of requiring the state to provide similar services to other affected students.
“This is a critical decision that benefits all English learners in Rhode Island. It recognizes that they are entitled to receive direct services from teachers certified in the teaching of English learners,” ACLU attorney Veronika Kot said. “It recognizes that special education students who are also English learners must receive services that are appropriate to their particular needs, and that any program must be based on sound research and adequate resources.”
Providence Public School District has not utilized the challenged model since at least August of 2018, when the PPSD Superintendent at the time and the Department of Justice signed a Settlement Agreement that explicitly recited that the model was educationally unsound, said RIDE spokesman David Folcarelli.
“All of this occurred prior to the state takeover of the PPSD, and Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green has consistently made clear from the outset of her tenure that the model may not be used in the PPSD or elsewhere in the state,” Folcarelli said in an email. “Statewide, the agency has designed and implemented Rhode Island’s first-ever statewide strategic plan for MLL education with the help of community stakeholders.”
(Update: Comments from ride added in 9th and 10th paragraphs)
