A young New Orleans child is caught in the crossfire as the city’s school district and its largest charter operator argue over the kindergartener’s special-education services.
While NOLA Public Schools officials allege that KIPP New Orleans Schools failed to educate the child last school year, the KIPP charter group contends it couldn’t educate the student at home without a doctor’s note.
The family wanted the child to be educated within a home setting, but was unable to make that happen. The charter deemed it wasn’t warranted.
Little is known about the child, whose identifying information is protected by student privacy laws. But the official documents hint at the challenges that the NOLA Public Schools district and its five-dozen independent charters face in providing special education.
The district oversees the provision of special-ed services within a system of independent charters. But nearly every school operates on its own to provide special-ed services to its students. Given that structure, the resulting patchwork of services and lack of coordination seem almost inevitable.
The warning that NOLA Public Schools gave KIPP in October describes the child as a student at KIPP East Primary School whose family was denied “homebound” services. The student never physically attended classes because of “multiple medical illnesses,” according to the district complaint.
The child, a kindergartener, had been receiving “walk-in services” the year prior, according to the district. As a pre-kindergartener, that likely meant the student visited a district site a few times a week for special-education services, for example, occupational therapy.
But district policy requires a doctor’s note for a child to be taught at home, O’Donnell said. And no doctor had ordered homebound instruction for this child. But it seems as though the child remained at home anyway, racking up enough absences to become officially truant.
KIPP officials are standing their ground, for larger reasons. They don’t believe that charters like KIPP should be on the hook for make-up special-ed services when parents elect to keep a kid out of school.
“What’s scary,” O’Donnell said, “(is) this idea that for any student moving forward who is truant, or by their own choice, or family is not sending them to school, the precedent of us as an LEA owing compensatory services in that situation.”
At this point, this is a debate in hindsight. The student seems to be enrolled in a new school and may be receiving services there now. But because the student missed schooling last year, the question now is: who is responsible to help the child make up that missed time? KIPP? Or the district?
Advocates note that the official game of hot potato left the family in the lurch for more than a year.
That’s common within the city’s unique, decentralized system of schools, according to Lauren Winkler, an attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center who represents families who sued the state and parish education agencies in 2010, leading to federal oversight of special education within all of the city’s public schools.
“Families are constantly told to bring their issues to someone else, which leads to no resolution,” Winkler said, noting that state officials will direct families to speak directly to charter schools or to the district. Then the schools tell families to talk to the district. And the district tells families to speak to the schools.
Often, after all those contacts, families find no resolution. “The two entities point fingers at one another,” she said.
A warning
Whenever the NOLA Public Schools district receives a complaint, its staff investigates.
The district typically issues written warnings — like the “notice of non-compliance” issued to KIPP in October — after a failed attempt to resolve the problem with school administration. Because this was an alleged violation of federal disability law, it triggered the district’s most serious warning — a “level two” notice, from district accountability director Rafael Simmons.
It appears that the student transferred into KIPP East in October 2023. KIPP got the child’s records two weeks later. Still, the child and school somehow did not connect. The complaint asserts that KIPP staff didn’t schedule the standard IEP (Individualized Education Plan) meeting with the family or provide any services. They did, however, take attendance. “A review of the student’s attendance record showed that the student was marked absent every day,” the notice reports.
A key part of KIPP’s defense is that federal disability law requires students to be able to learn in the “least restrictive setting” possible. That standard is in place to ensure students with disabilities aren’t removed from traditional classrooms unnecessarily.
If a newly enrolled student had come with an IEP that called for homebound services, KIPP would have provided them, O’Donnell contends. “KIPP’s policy is also to honor homebound services already listed on a new student’s IEP and/or evaluation from their former school if they’ve already made this placement decision,” he said.
Judging from the timeline, the student’s family likely contacted NOLA Public Schools to file a complaint last spring or summer. But this fall, things went no better with the young student. The family attended an IEP meeting in August 2024, but had yet to receive any services when the district sent the warning notice to KIPP in October.
A doctor denied the family’s request for homebound services in October 2024.
The following month the student’s family asked the district for a “hardship transfer.” Hardship transfers are allowed in very limited circumstances, if needed for physical safety or a family move, and they must be approved by the central NOLA Public Schools office, often after a hearing at the current school.
For unknown reasons, the district denied the family’s request to leave KIPP East.
In an interesting facet of school choice, the family was not allowed to transfer the child. But after the student didn’t show at school for three weeks, KIPP East was required to drop the child.
So, in December, after missing 15 days of school in a row, KIPP dropped the student from its rolls, as required by district policy. When schools “drop” such students after excessive absences, it both triggers truancy-officer intervention and prevents schools from collecting per-pupil funding for students who aren’t attending classes.
After a student is removed from a charter school’s roster, the district is responsible for ensuring the student is enrolled in a new school.
In the end, O’Donnell said, this child did not receive schooling from KIPP because the student did not come to school. That has nothing to do with special ed. “This is a truancy issue,” he said.
Meanwhile, district officials fear that charter schools that don’t want to provide special-ed services could steer families to seek transfers or drop them from school rolls.
Regardless of who is responsible, the district could have jumped in sooner to help get the child back in school, said Hector Linares, a civil-rights lawyer at the Loyola Law Clinic. “The situation could have possibly been resolved sooner if someone from (the district) had worked with the parents informally to provide advice and consultation so that they understood their rights and duties and provided follow up.”
Who is responsible?
Earlier this year, state and Orleans Parish district officials asked to be released from the federal court’s supervision for special-ed compliance – supervision that began with the lawsuit in 2010. Winkler and her team have opposed that request, citing years of monitoring errors from the Louisiana Department of Education.
The overall landscape is complicated, because, in New Orleans, nearly every charter school is considered its own school district, legally responsible for providing special education to all students — a key requirement of the 2010 special education settlement.
The KIPP East complaint is “a prime example” of the way that children can fall through the cracks, one of the problems advocates sought to address and track in the lawsuit, Linares said, and a reason that the order should stay in place.
To avoid confusion for children who do need homebound services, NOLA Public Schools should centralize its special education, Linares said. Traditional school districts typically have on-staff homebound special-education providers who can travel from the central office based on student needs. “The bigger issue is that very few charters are equipped to offer homebound services when a child needs it, as the need for home instruction for a particular student can occur relatively rarely and with little notice,” Linares said.
Plus, the district has already centralized some of its systems to protect special-education students, Linares notes. For instance, the district-run enrollment lottery ensures schools don’t turn away students with disabilities. The discipline system also ensures the district reviews expulsions so that schools don’t improperly, or illegally, punish students with disabilities.
“In my opinion, homebound services is another area that is ripe for centralization, to avoid exactly the type of finger-pointing back and forth happening in the KIPP case, which happens after a student has been denied services for an extended period of time,” Linares said.
At this point, the finger-pointing goes like this. KIPP East could not, by law, provide the homeschooling requested by the parents, O’Donnell says. What happened from October to May last year is a little fuzzy, though records show nonstop absences.
But in October 2024, once the child’s doctor denied homebound services and the child missed three weeks of school, KIPP made a referral to the district’s centralized truancy office and was no longer responsible for the student, O’Donnell says. Yet the district says that KIPP was responsible for the entire period that the child was enrolled there – and should be responsible for helping the child make up months of missed work.
Though the two parties recently met to discuss this matter, no resolution has been announced — the complaint remains open.
What is clear is that a child spent most of a year without any schooling — and started a second year in the same way. Yet even six months later, it’s unclear who is responsible for that.