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by Amy Diaz
North Carolina does not track whether or not private schools receiving Opportunity Scholarships provide services for students with disabilities. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Last year, the North Carolina General Assembly voted to significantly increase funding for private school vouchers, also known as Opportunity Scholarships. The state has spent nearly $383 million on these vouchers in this academic year alone.
Listener Walter Strong of High Point wondered what the requirements are for schools to receive this funding, and how many of them provide services for students with disabilities? WFDD’s Amy Diaz set out to find the answer in this edition of Carolina Curious.
The first question was an easy one. According to the State Education Assistance Authority website, private schools receiving Opportunity Scholarships have four annual requirements.
They need to submit a tuition and fee schedule, share nationally standardized test results for scholarship students, report graduation data for seniors who received funding, and for larger schools, undergo a financial review.
Also, every three years, the school needs to conduct a criminal history check on its highest decision-making authority.
The second question — how many of these schools provide services for students with disabilities — was harder.
According to officials from the agency, North Carolina doesn’t track that information at all. To find the answer, I needed to make some calls.
I went down the list of every private school in Guilford County that received Opportunity Scholarships this academic year. There are 31 of them, and in total, they received roughly $22 million as of February.
Not every school picked up, but I got a range of answers for the ones that did.
About five of them have specialized programs in place to support students with disabilities. Like Lionheart Academy of the Triad for children with autism, and Piedmont School in High Point for kids with attention-deficit and language-based disorders.
But the majority of schools that responded basically said, it depends.
“You can’t discriminate against people with disabilities, right? And particularly a Quaker school would never do that, but we have to make sure that we can provide for the person,” says Rob Kelley, head of the High Point Friends School.
He says they could accommodate a student with mobility issues, for example, but for other disabilities they might not have the resources.
“If kids are blind, for instance, it would be very challenging for us to accommodate that,” Kelley said. “But there are schools that that’s what they do, because it is such a specific disability that requires extra training from individuals like special education teachers that some schools just won’t have.”
Many of these schools say they’re not staffed to serve children with “serious learning disabilities,” but that they assess each child on a case-by-case basis to determine if they can make accommodations.
But for about five schools, even that conversation seemed to be off the table. Some say there isn’t enough staff. Others say they’re not equipped to make modifications to instruction based on an individual student’s needs.
One school’s website says that if a child is accepted, and is later determined to have a learning disability, the school will request that the student withdraw.
So, to what extent are private schools legally required to accept and accommodate students with disabilities?
I called Carlton Powell, the interim director of The Right to Education Project with Legal Aid of North Carolina. He explained the different requirements on this for public and private schools.
“Public school students are protected under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act,” Powell says. “It’s an act passed by Congress that guarantees those children access to quote ‘a free and appropriate public education,’ in the least restrictive environment.”
Private schools on the other hand, typically don’t have to abide by the IDEA unless they’re receiving federal funding. But Powell says they do have to comply with Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability.
Private schools controlled by religious institutions are exempt from that section of the ADA, but for other schools, he says this means they can’t deny services to students with special needs and need to make accommodations to the extent that they’re reasonable.
“If the entity can demonstrate that making such a modification would fundamentally alter the nature of the education that they provide, they can’t be expected to do it,” Powell says.
Still, he says it can be difficult to prove discrimination, especially in the private school setting. But with the voucher expansion, and thousands more students going to private schools, more and more of these cases are coming his way.
“I think this issue of students on Opportunity Scholarships, going to private schools and being discriminated against there, is something that is going to have to be addressed,” he says. “And, yeah, we’re looking to do that.”
The Right to Education Project is taking on some of these cases, but Powell says there are fewer avenues for non-public school parents to file complaints now.
The U.S. Department of Justice recently issued a directive to its Civil Rights Division to freeze all ongoing or new litigation. That office was one place those families could go to enforce ADA compliance.
Now, Powell says, their only option is federal court.
Amy Diaz covers education for WFDD in partnership with Report For America. You can follow her on Twitter at @amydiaze.
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