A great deal of progress has been made with documenting the services, and that's the key here. When that original "90,000 hours" was cited, the problem was that auditors either couldn't find, or couldn't understand, the documentation that the related service providers had put into the students' folders. At some point everyone--the auditors, the court, the attorneys--just threw up their hands and said "the heck with it, EVERYBODY'S going to get compensatory services", whether services were missed or not. This created yet another paperwork nightmare for the schools, as we did two years' (and more) worth of IEP meetings to address "remedy" services.

Shortly thereafter the Encounter Tracker software was introduced, and it goes a long way toward standardizing the documentation of related service provision. (The special educators don't use it at present, but I'm hoping that they're next.)

On a side, but related, note: Dr. Alonso's argument that "nobody" can attain the 2% standard in the Consent Decree may be accurate, but it's a poor argument to bring before the court. It's akin to some child whining to his parent, "but everybody else gets ice cream before dinner." My mom's argument was usually "And if all your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you go, too?" Perhaps we were the ones who jumped first, Dr. A.

(@ Post by: Claude)
Q&A:
Your quote:” A great deal of progress has been made with documenting the services, and that's the key here. When that original "90,000 hours" those auditors either couldn't find, or couldn't understand, the documentation that the related service providers had put into the students' folders".

Can you help me to understand better? Were the auditors cited problem in student folders mis-handling findings either a result reflection of outside hired/contracted Independent Service Providers documentation created errors.

Perhaps or School System staff members mis-handling student folders documentation errors created from within the BCPSS Office of Special Education for Primary/Secondary school, by Coordinators - Area Special Education Compliance, Monitoring-Educational Specialist, created the documenting services errors? Can you help me to understand? Which is it or is it a combination of both? I don't know much about the special education area.

Your quote:” Shortly thereafter the Encounter Tracker software was introduced and it goes a long way toward standardizing the documentation of related service provision. (The special educators don't use it at present, but I'm hoping that they're next.)” Can you help us to understand? In your opinion special education for Primary/Secondary schools, there is not an essential school system professional development standard for ITD to provide Encounter Tracker software training for special educator classroom teachers to introduce standardizing the documentation of related service provision?

@I&E: Let me try to clarify. When it came to related services, there was no standardization of the way that the services were documented. Some people noted service in one part of the folder, some in another, some kept personal records that weren't in the students' folders at all. And it didn't seem to matter whether the providers were contractual or system employess.

Therefore, when the auditors came, it was a nightmare for them to try to figure out who got services and who didn't. I know for a fact that students in my schools got their services with very few (if any) misses, but in the end, it didn't matter: as a means of just putting an end to it all, the school attorneys and the court simply agreed to give all of the students the "remedy" service, regardless.

I'll grant you that when folders are audited, they're rarely left in the same condition in which they were found (and often simply abandoned on the table for us to put away), but I doubt that materials were removed. It was really a matter of getting everyone to document services in the same way, and this is why Encounter Tracker has been so useful in bringing about the improved statistics. If a service is missed, a provider is usually flagged in time to perform a make-up session. ET software has also helped IEP Teams to locate and correct data entry errors on the original documents (e.g. if an IEP incorrectly calls for 30 hours of speech per week instead of 30 minutes).

As of right now, Special Educators still document their services manually rather than through software, but steps have been taken to ensure that, again, some standardization is in place. Contact Logs and Encounter Forms are now identical city-wide, and are expected to be filed in a timely manner. I have no idea whether there are plans to expand ET to the special educators, but I have hopes.

The downside to all of this is that hardcopies of everything is expected to be in the folder, and the presence of a record in the Encounter Tracker database is meaningless unless it's also in the folder. So a school can have a 100% compliance rate and STILL manage to fail an audit. Thus, the folders just get bigger and bigger, and individual pieces of data within them keep getting more difficult to locate.

It's complicated stuff for those not "in the know", so I hope I've made it a little clearer.

@Claude - Actually, I'll echo I&EP here, can you explain Encounter Tracker? I don't understand it at all. How does it relate to or interact with Maryland Online IEP, SASI, and SMS? Does it provide documentation for IEPs, update IEPs, both, neither? All these programs! I may be missing even more (Oracle?), but if you could explain how these work, I'd definitely appreciate it.

The 90,000 hours they came up with were many false missed services. I, personally, provided every service, had the documentation, copied it and brought it down to North Ave, in a box. When I arrived, there were many other boxes, records, etc. The problem was, at least as it related to my school, an organizational problem related to North Ave. and the auditors. Too add to it all, they paid many of us extra money to stay after school, compile, copy, and transport those records to North Ave. All wasted b/c in the end, we were identified as missing our that were never missed at all.

OK, here's the relationship. Remember that I'm not an IT guy so this may not be 100% accurate but it'll be correct at its heart:

SASI, at present, maintains the student demographic and enrollment information. As I understand matters, SMS will soon replace SASI. Right now, SMS is used to monitor disciplinary information and Student Support Team activity. Information from SASI populates the demographic information that's found in Maryland Online IEP.

Maryland Online IEP is the web-based program that schools use to write IEPs for Special Education students. Incidentally, numerous districts throughout the state use this program, so if a student from another county which also uses MDOIEP transfers to the city, all of the prior IEP records in the database will come along with that student. (The bad news: MDOIEP is not being used by Baltimore or Anne Arundel Counties, where most of our transfers come from/go to.) When a student's IEP is developed or revised, the information from MDOIEP is used to populate the service information in Encounter Tracker.

Encounter Tracker is a web-based program used by service providers to maintain their caseloads and document the provision of services, whether related to an IEP or not. When a student is given, say, Speech service on an IEP, that student will appear on the Speech Pathologist's caseload in ET. (I don't know how it works for larger schools which may have, say, two Speech Pathologists.)

In documenting service, providers can specify whether a contact is "IEP Based", "Non-IEP based service", "Make-up service", or some other category. Providers can also run reports to ensure that no services are missed. Each month, they are required to print out hardcopies of these encounter notes, sign them in the appropriate places and place the copies in the students' confidential folders.

I don't have a lot of direct contact with ET but that's my experience with it. I'll talk to my providers later today and post again if there's anything important about it that I missed.

Oracle is another bit of software which powers the Transportation database; I'm not sure what else it may be used for. It, too, draws data from SASI.

Confusing? You bet. But I'm happy to answer more questions. After all, most of you are paying for this stuff.

While we're speaking of electronic systems that still need hardcopies to be "official" can someone explain why I can't get electronic copies of IEP's? They have tons of pages, are created with some uniform piece of software and for some reason there's no way to export the files to a .pdf or .doc or something? I know schools are strapped for copy paper and usually I get a preliminary copy before a meeting and a working copy at the end of the meeting. Then I can't get a final copy as soon as it's done via email, I have to wait for a printout to get mailed to me. I try to keep all these papers organized in my house, but it's a losing battle. If I could put it in my PC I could always be sure that I had all the IEPs from past meetings at every meeting I go to. And along the same lines, why am I responsible for bringing the latest IEP from my school to North Ave. when I go to meetings? How is it possible that some of the people involved in special ed aren't on-line and need to make copies of my copies? I try to bite my tongue when all these glowing reports about improvements in special ed come out, it still seems like a disastrous swirl of papers and confusion from this parent's perspective.

Disclaimer - My frustration is directed towards the process and tools and not towards the people who are following/using them. Where the rubber hits the road for this school year, it's been good.

@Parent: Under the prior computer system (pre-MDOIEP), you couldn't get an e-copy of an IEP. Now the system generates PDF files, which is what gets printed out. There's no reason nowadays that you can't get an IEP emailed to you.

Likewise, anyone at the Puzzle Palace who has access to MDOIEP should be able to call up a copy of your child's record.

Certain documents (meeting invitations and some reports) aren't PDFs and therefore don't email correctly--there's a formatting issue of some kind involved--but the IEP itself should be no problem at all.

Alas - tools with features that users aren't trained to use = not going to be used. Same with people who have a need to see an IEP, but have never used the MDOIEP system.

Seems like a perfect opportunity for PD to me. The cost should be saved many times over with less paper used, less files lost, less copies made, less confussion generated by looking at out-of-date IEPs...

@Claude - Thanks so much for the detailed explanation. It was extremely helpful.