Settlement Reached in Baltimore Special-Ed Lawsuit

March 9, 2010

School officials and attorneys have agreed to settle a 26-year-old lawsuit that accused Baltimore public schools of denying special education students their federally mandated right to an equal education including basic services like transportation to and from school.

Senior U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis gave preliminary approval Monday to the settlement agreement, whi ch would end court oversight of the city’s special education programs in July and end the lawsuit entirely by no later than September 2012.

The lawsuit was filed in 1984 on behalf of a city student known as "Vaughn G." and ultimately came to include more than 30 plaintiffs. State officials and attorneys in the lawsuit said Monday that the turning point came when Andres A. Alonso took over as Baltimore schools chief in 2007.

"We’re talking about systemic change," said Leslie Seid Margolis, an attorney with the Maryland Disability Law Center who represented the plaintiffs throughout the majority of the lawsuit. "His predecessors didn’t have as much of an interest in changing the system."

Over the span of the lawsuit, special education students in Baltimore did not get enough speech and language therapy or occupational and physical therapy, and many were taught in separate classes that did not offer adequate instruction, State Schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick said.

"There were children who weren’t even coming to school on a regular basis because of transportation problems," Grasmick said. "Nobody even knew how long they’d been out of school."

Garbis issued a series of increasingly wide-ranging consent decrees in an effort to get the school system into compliance. The current consent decree has been in effect since 2000, with the special education system overseen by a court-appointed special master. That oversight will end when Garbis approves the settlement, which is expected to happen after a public comment hearing April 19.

Under the settlement, the state will continue to monitor city schools over the next two years as officials try to mitigate problems involving student discipline and the need for staff training, among other issues. Margolis said that while those remaining problems are important, continuing litigation would not serve anyone’s interests.

Alonso, Grasmick and elected officials, including Gov. Martin O’Malley
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and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, praised each other for their cooperation during a news conference outside the federal courthouse in downtown Baltimore.

But relationships between the parties and stakeholders in the lawsuit have not always been so rosy. In 2004, then-mayor O’Malley,
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a Democrat, said the court’s intervention had gone too far and that the state, then led by Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich, was not "a reliable partner."

Alonso stressed that similar lawsuits are ongoing in many other large, urban school systems.

"What we hope is that we continue to move forward and we don’t slide back in any way," Alonso said. "We have had consistency of progress over several years."

Margolis said she was no longer in regular contact with any of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

"They’re long out of the school system," she said.