Opinion ID: 619919
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Special education

Text: Section K of Plan 2000 requires PCSSD to identify standards for preventing inappropriate referrals of black males and black kindergarten students to special education and to develop a specific plan for monitoring of schools where there are atypically high racial disparities in special education classification, generally or as to black male students, including criteria for identifying schools for monitoring. Section K also requires PCSSD to submit copies of these standards and criteria to the Joshua Intervenors. Pursuant to Plan 2000, PCSSD notified the Joshua Intervenors that an 8.3 percent standard deviation would serve as its criterion for identifying schools with atypically high racial disparities in special education classification. In other words, a school has an atypically high racial disparity under Plan 2000 if the percentage of the school's students in special education who are black exceeds the percentage of its students overall who are black by more than 8.3 percentage points. The district court found that, although multiple individual schools each year failed to satisfy the 8.3 percent standard, PCSSD failed to develop a specific plan for those individual schools as required by Section K. In response, PCSSD notes primarily that its district-wide percentage of students in special education who are black has not exceeded the district-wide percentage of students overall who are black by more than 8.3 percentage points while Plan 2000 has been in effect. PCSSD fails to explain, however, how this fact would relieve PCSSD of its obligation to develop specific plans for each individual school within the district that does not meet the standard each year, as expressly required by Section K. PCSSD also argues that its non-compliance is excusable because, over the past ten years, there have been only nine failures of individual high schools to meet the 8.3 percent standard in a given year, all occurring prior to 2006. The evidence cited by PCSSD, however, does not support PCSSD's summarization. [8] Moreover, a much larger number of elementary and middle schools also have failed to meet the 8.3 percent standard. PCSSD agreed in Plan 2000 to develop specific plans for each of these instances, and it indisputably failed to do so. Therefore, we affirm the denial of unitary status for PCSSD in the area of special education.