The state Department of Education launched an investigation into the Connecticut Technical Education and Career System Wednesday after reviewing an email sent by Justin Lowe, the interim superintendent of the technical school system, in which he described a process that was apparently meant to deny admission to students with disabilities to help keep costs low — even though, he wrote, it could be in violation of federal law.
The education department’s legal director, Mike McKeon, said there’s been heightened concern for months about whether the CTEC system was providing equal access to education.
“They are excluding students, or at least trying, to reduce the number of students based upon their disabilities,” McKeon said, adding that the department had repeatedly requested the number of enrolled students with disabilities, but the data was never provided.
“It’s failure to foster an inclusive environment for these children. I don’t see how you can read it any other way,” said Erin Benham, the vice chair of the state Board of Education.
The state Board of Education approved the education department’s 10-4B complaint — a claim that the CTEC system “has failed or is unable to make reasonable provisions to implement the educational interests of the state” — at its November meeting.
Benham said “time is of the essence” as the application period for tech schools opens in December and students are placed in the system in February.
In early October, interim superintendent Lowe sent an email to each of the heads of counseling across the 17 schools in the system. McKeon received a copy of the email on Oct. 10 “from someone who was concerned about its contents.”
Attempts to reach Lowe for comment were unsuccessful. CTEC Communication Director Kerry Markey said she was “unable to comment” on the investigation and Lowe’s email.
In the email, Lowe described being in a “tricky spot with admissions and how we meet the vision of the district, navigate the tremendous cost that come with our ballooning special education population, and most notably, make the necessary changes to our admissions that will help stop the unsustainable level of admitting students that have significant disciplinary histories, require nurses/paras/behavioral therapists, and so on.”
Lowe added, “We all have a favorite kid who is special education,” but since 2019, the system has seen an increase of students with a disability from 1,235 to 1,950.
“This past year I have reinstituted the safety review board, which by our current numbers, right or wrong, has disenrolled a large number of students from our buildings, 73% of which are special education,” Lowe wrote. “The state believes we are in violation of federal laws by continuing on with the safety review board. I was able to buy us a year, but if I didn’t, we would have over 2,100 special education students in our schools, with no increases in funding to support our teachers, and especially you, the counselors, who often are on the front lines with families and these high need students.”
The system’s “safety review panels” were designed to review potential students and gauge if they were a safety risk, McKeon said. In summer meetings with the CTEC system, the Department of Education raised concerns that students couldn’t be excluded “based upon conduct that occurred prior to coming into a school system.”
“There was no legislative basis for this,” McKeon said. “I also expressed a concern that this could disproportionally affect particular demographics of students. There were meetings that followed between CSDE and between CTECS in which we shared our concerns, and CTECS advised that they were going to move away from the safety panels beginning next year.”
In those meetings, McKeon said, CTEC leadership told the Department of Education that they planned to shift to a lottery admission system, which is how other choice schools, like charter and magnet schools, enroll students.
In Lowe’s internal email, however, he described setting up a “lottery with preference” that would control enrolling “our schools with the right kids.”
“There are ideas such as sibling and alumni preference, setting limits on enrollment for neighborhoods, middle schools and towns,” Lowe’s email said. “We also looked at a model from Massachusetts for a ‘qualified lottery’ where certain qualifications got you into a first-round lottery, with 50% of enrollment coming from that. The next 50% would be based on how we do it now.”
In the email, Lowe said a “lottery was our best bet” to avoid being sued by the state for discrimination and that he had been “selling [the idea] for months.”
In October, Lowe decided to rescind the lottery admission decision as a result of “feedback, industry concerns, confusion, worry and simply put, a lack of clear direction that I could not stand behind as your Superintendent,” the email read.
McKeon said the email was “written without authorization and contrary to the internal processes of CTEC.”
“We’ve had good faith conversations with them, then from this email, it would appear that we were really being played and that this was not a sincere approach that was being suggested by CTECS,” McKeon said.
“In my career, I’ve tried a lot of cases in federal state trial courts, I’ve argued a number of appeals in federal and state appellate courts. I have never seen a more alarming document,” McKeon added. “I say that without a scintilla of hyperbole.”
The system’s 2022-23 Profile and Performance Report did not include information on how much the CTECS spent in 2022-23 on special education costs.