One Baltimore teen-ager sailed the Caribbean aboard a Carnival cruise ship. Another filled her Armistead Gardens home with the latest in electronics from Circuit City, including a computer with printer and scanner, a television, a VCR, and a fax machine. Yet another family got three home computers, one for each child.
Lucky winners in a game-show giveaway?
No. Baltimore special education students.
Under orders from a federal court, the Baltimore school system gave away more than $2 million in merchandise, trips, summer camp fees, gift certificates and tuition last year. The goodies were, in effect, consolation prizes for lost education - awards meant to compensate thousands of special education children who hadn't received the instruction or services they were supposed to get.
The giveaway, perhaps the most eye-catching misstep in a 10-year struggle to improve special education, arose from the frustrations and futility of the marathon federal court case, Vaughn G. vs. The Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, et. al.
As legal arguments collapsed into bickering, the notion that missed education could be replaced with toys and TVs took on a logic - and a life - of its own.
"What good are goods? ... There's no lasting value in that. I'm embarrassed by it," says Gayle Amos, the new special education administrator charged with straightening out the mess.
No more free TVs
Under Amos, the school system has stopped giving away TVs and VCRs, though computers are still offered to students. New administrators have instituted stricter controls, but they admit that they are just beginning to realize the extent of the damage.
"The program," says a circumspect Amos, "was very badly managed."
For about a year, from March 1997 until last April, the awards program was run by former court monitor Felicity Lavelle, who was paid more than even the schools' chief executive, and the school's Office of Compensatory Awards - with the full approval of the federal court.
The program worked like this:
Hours of missed lessons or therapy were converted to points. Points, worth up to $25 each, could be cashed in like trading stamps to buy merchandise listed in a catalog designed by Lavelle. The longer a child had waited for special education testing, the more lessons or therapy he had missed, the more things his parents could buy.
Some parents went after the loot like participants in a 60-second shopping contest, loading up on home appliances, cell phones and pagers. Others begged to use the credits to pay for job training or private schooling, only to be pushed toward the catalog, which offered trips to Seattle and New Orleans and "toys and games for sensory stimulation."
"The thrust of it was, 'You all have so many kids with missed services that you're going to have to give them [something] to make it up, and this is the only remedy,'" says Baltimore schools lawyer Abbey G. Hairston, who contends that the school system and the children's lawyers are equally to blame. "I just think the whole thing stinks, and I'm very unhappy."
Basketball for therapy
Between March 1, 1997, and April 1 of this year, 2,443 students received compensatory awards, including 100 students who collected $5,000 to $10,000 worth. Forty-five youngsters received awards worth more than $10,000, and three had tallies that topped $30,000, according to school records.
Of the about $2 million in awards given during Lavelle's tenure, only 10 percent was used for tutoring or therapy.
But even then, not all lessons or therapy took place in schools.
Thousands of dollars went for midnight basketball camps - termed therapy for emotionally disturbed youths.
The 18-year-old who took the Carnival cruise did so under the guise of paying for dance lessons - an acceptable option, according to the catalog. And he did dance aboard ship in costumes purchased by the Baltimore school system.
Most of the students who had large compensatory awards received computers with accessories and extended warranties. But most weren't taught how to use them.
Between March 1997 and April of this year, the school system spent $838,447 for 395 computers, at retail prices ranging from $1,919 Apples to $2,898 Sonys.
Former Patterson High School student George H. Justice Jr. got a $2,500 gift certificate to purchase "computer supplies" - a year and two months after he was jailed in an August 1996 slaying. With Justice in prison, convicted of second-degree murder, his mother declined to comment but said that the award "did go to his benefit."
One parent exchanged the computer given to her child for a stove and a refrigerator.
Yet another family who got three $2,500 NEC computers - one for each child - didn't want any of them.
Parent Phyllis Ricks says she had asked to use her children's credits for job training. She especially wanted to send her daughter, Angela Thomas, to cosmetology classes to develop the girl's talent for styling hair. Instead, Ricks received a Sunday morning phone call from a school employee who told her the computers would be delivered that afternoon.
Nine months later, two of the machines are still unplugged, and the third is scarcely used.
"They don't know how to use no computers," Ricks says of her children. "I wanted them to go to school and be something."
After school officials learned of Ricks' plight this summer from The Sun, they offered to arrange job training for her high school-age children.
Parent Diana Cook bought more than $6,000 worth of merchandise, including a computer, printer, scanner, television, VCR, fax machine and other electronics, with points awarded to her family. One child, 16 years old, barely reads at a third-grade level.
"I would give it all back tomorrow," Cook says, "if my children could just learn to read. I But what were we supposed to do? Not take anything? If you didn't take it in a year, the money went back to the system. Either you took it or you lost it."
And parent Deborah Jowers says she had to fight to be allowed to use her 12-year-old son's $26,000 award for private school tuition. The school system had delayed more than two years in testing her son to determine whether he needed to be in special education.
"The things that are being offered are designed to appease parents," says Jowers, a former Baltimore teacher. "But they're things that are not hitting on the major problem, which is that the kid has missed out [on education]."
Working with TVs
The idea to give students electronics and other goods to compensate them for missed education came from attorneys representing the children in the long-running special education lawsuit against city schools. Attorney Winifred DePalma argued that these children missed more schooling than they could possibly make up and therefore should be given something else to enrich their lives - whether it was a television, a computer or a membership to the National Aquarium in Baltimore.
"A TV is one vehicle for delivering educational content, a means by which a parent can work with a child," says DePalma. "The parents wanted these options."
Former courts monitor Lavelle, interviewed in Philadelphia, also defends the program and says she is not concerned that some parents took advantage of the system.
"Maybe [the student] did miss speech and language or whatever," Lavelle says "But what the child needed was a driver's license so [he could] get a job. So why not give [the child] driver's ed?"
The awards program was several years in the making and arose from efforts to improve special education.
The case began 14 years ago when advocates sued city schools, alleging that special education students weren't being tested and placed in the appropriate classes and that once in those classes, they were not getting the services they required. Federal law requires schools to provide disabled children with education tailored to their needs.
That lawsuit was settled in 1988 amid promises from school officials that they would work quickly to improve special education.
But, in 1992, the court found that children were still not receiving the education and services the school system had promised to provide. U.S. District Judge Alexander Harvey II ordered the school to compensate students for what they missed.
The school system offered make-up classes, but few children took them.
Four years later, the school system had a 2,000-case backlog of children owed compensatory services. U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis, a no-nonsense Harvard-educated tax attorney who assumed the case from Harvey, denounced the compensatory awards office as "a glaring example of bureaucratic inefficiency."
"Where [the Baltimore school system] fails to deliver compensatory services to a student, it fails the student a second time, and, likewise, avoids its obligation to the student a second time," Garbis wrote in an order in June 1996 .
In that order, Garbis also opposed a proposal by lawyers representing special education students for the students to receive things instead of education. He urged the city to work out a reasonable solution.
But, as the language of his orders suggests, he was becoming impatient.
Since taking the case in July 1994, Garbis had held then-Superintendent Walter Amprey in civil contempt and threatened criminal contempt and jail; he had levied fines on the school system and unsuccessfully tried to take money from Amprey's own pocketbook; he had gradually taken control of special education away from the city. And nothing had worked.
"If you're dealing with a person, you can hold him in contempt and put him in jail. A business entity you can fine into the Stone Age. But if you're dealing with an institution whose job is to provide services to children, you can't do anything that will hurt the children," says Garbis, speaking in general of a judge's role. "You get the point where you're thinking, what would you do next?"
Amprey says he didn't take the special education case as seriously as perhaps he should have.
"There was this sidecar over here loaded with grenades that I wasn't paying attention to," says Amprey. "From a political standpoint, that maybe wasn't smart."
Finally, in February 1997 Garbis did as he had done with other aspects of special education management. He took control of the compensatory awards office away from the school system and gave it to court monitor Lavelle.
A Philadelphia lawyer given to wearing crystals and spouting New Age philosophy, Lavelle had overseen the city's compliance with court orders and special education law since 1988. By the time she resigned in March, she had earned $1.8 million - not counting reimbursed expenses that often exceeded $2,000 a month. The last year in her job, Lavelle was paid $239,000 - more than the combined salaries of six special education teachers and $100,000 more than former interim CEO Robert Schiller earned.
Exempted from rules
Garbis, who has consistently declined to discuss the case, won't say whether he knew that Lavelle was giving away toys and TVs, but he appears pained by what happened.
"Whatever is my responsibility, is my responsibility," says Garbis. "I am responsibile for it."
When Garbis gave control to Lavelle, he exempted her and the compensatory awards office from procedures that govern school contracts and purchases. Without the usual requirements to use an approved vendor list and seek bids, shoppers for the awards office were free to choose any store and any sales clerk.
Parents were allowed to select anything their points afforded. Many, unfamiliar with computers, were vulnerable to sales pitches and selected sophisticated equipment their children couldn't use and expensive extended warranties they didn't need - all at the cost of thousands of dollars to the school district.
In the process, a few stores and one salesman profitted handsomely.
Almost half of all the computers given to the families were sold by the Circuit City store in Catonsville and most of those through salesman Jack R. Pearce.
Angela Tate, who worked in the awards office until July, says that she steered parents to Pearce because he had been helpful when others were not.
"You go where someone will take the time and work with you," says Tate.
Says Pearce, "I guess I just must have impressed her."
Neither Tate nor Pearce, however, could explain why on at least two occasions, when parents had gone to a different Circuit City store and used a different salesperson, Pearce had been credited with the sale.
A Circuit City spokesman says the company has found nothing improper in Pearce's relationship with the compensatory awards office. School officials say, nevertheless, that they have curtailed business with the electronics chain because they found that the arrangement was too susceptible to potential conflicts and abuse.
The school system is dealing primarily with two other retailers who, it says, have provided better prices and training for the students. Outside auditors are examining the program to determine where abuses occurred and how to prevent new ones, school officials said.
The aim now, Amos says, is to stop giving away computers altogether. But first, the school system must provide special education students with the services and lessons they're entitled to on time and in the proper way - something it hasn't been able to do.
"I think it's a shame we have to have the Office of Compensatory Awards," says schools lawyer Hairston. "That is a black mark on the school system."
Pub Date: 9/22/98