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May 15, 2009

City’s top special ed official will leave at school year’s end

by Philissa Cramer, at 7:37 pm

The head of the city’s special education division has announced that she is stepping down at the end of the school year, a surprise move that comes at a time when a top-to-bottom review of special education is underway.

Linda Wernikoff said her decision to retire is not related to the review or the changes its conclusion could bring to her department. “I think I’ve had a wonderful 35-year career here and I’m very proud of the work that we’ve done,” she told me. “Now I think it’s time that I need to try new things.”

Under Wernikoff’s leadership, the Department of Education has focused on reducing the proportion of children who are in special education-only classes, and the graduation rate for students with special needs has inched up, although it still remains quite low. Wernikoff, who began her career in 1974 as a speech teacher, told me she had no specific plans yet for her future, but she said, “Whatever I do will continue to be advocating for students with special needs.”

People that I spoke to today said Wernikoff’s departure will be a blow for the special education community.

“Linda has formed relationships with many in the advocacy community over the years,” said Kim Sweet, executive director of Advocates for Children of New York (and my former boss). “It will be a major change.”

“Whether you like her or you don’t like her is immaterial but what she has is teaching experience and institutional memory, and when you lose the institution’s memory, you may be condemned to repeat your mistakes,” said Ellen McHugh, a parent who sits on the Citywide Council on Special Education. “It’s sad to see her go.”"She has a great understanding of the system,” said Carmen Alvarez, the teachers union’s special education head. “She can connect the dots between all of the programs, and once she goes there’s not going to be anybody else to do that.”

According to Wernikoff and others in the department, there are no specific plans yet about who will take over her role. David Cantor, a DOE spokesman, said Garth Harries, the former McKinsey consultant who is currently leading the special education review, is not under consideration for the spot. When Harries began the review, some questioned whether he had the experience to make decisions about special education.

“Replacing someone with her depth of experience is going to be very difficult,” McHugh said.

Wernikoff has been the top special education official since early 2003, when her predecessor left as part of a shakeup of high-level administration that happened when Joel Klein became chancellor. Klein called Wernikoff’s tenure at the DOE “long and impressive” in a statement he released this afternoon. “Linda has been an outstanding leader in our school system and is enormously respected by parents and educators,” he said. “We will miss her.”

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  • http://books.google.com/books?id=4SPdLvhIUA4C&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=ld+discrepancy+model&source=bl&ots=KinKNUpxpT&sig=qMQ-6sOrZMo-aqPGf8KIoZu9r_E&hl=en&ei=QwUOSvaMK42stgf Jack

    She is leaving while everything is still fairly good on the surface. As Ms. Cramer noted, the graduation rates have ticked up slightly, community involvement has become something of a priority, and teacher standards have tightened. The new SOPM will be, perhaps, her greatest legacy – especially if employees are given the time to actually read it.

    Unfortunately, the quality of special education programs across the city remain terrible, most notably in the Bronx and other areas of the city where parents don’t know how to advocate for themselves. To say that there has been an uptick in monies spent on Impartial Hearings is a vast understatement. Ms. Wernikoff laughably responded by gutting the IH teams and replacing qualified clinicians with paralegals who have no experience at all. Parents will continue to hire lawyers to plead their cases: the DOE does not have special education programs that meet the needs of their children. By and large, the aggrieved parents are right. Administrators, especially at the CPSE and elementary school levels, need to get the message that their careers will not be enhanced by cutting essential related services, a risible act of “standing up” to parents who want help. Glimmers of hope like the NEST program for kids on the Autistic spectrum and PBIS for kids with behavioral issues give the rest of us hope that our department can slowly create high caliber programs for everyone.

    New blood is needed. It is hard to believe that we’re using anachronistic definitions for classification. We need someone who doesn’t think a learning disability is a 1.5 standard deviation between IQ and one achievement subtest (ref. link). Response to Intervention is the new new thing but upper level administrators have not yet gotten the memo. Maybe they’re terrified of training employees of a certain age who are not amenable to learning something different.

    I truly hope that fresh eyes will start to turn the battleship around towards a best practices, research-based model. Our most vulnerable kids need nothing less than the best.

  • dotty

    Linda Wernikoff is the only person at the DoE who understands special needs kids and what they need. The overarching decisions — incompetent reorganization after ignorant reorganization — made by the DoE that make it difficult for special needs kids to get an education were not made by her, but by the Big Boys upstairs — the ones who used ideology, not knowledge, to drive their “reforms.” We now have more kids than ever getting special ed services. What a crack team! What genius dreamed up the total atomization of evaluation, placement and instruction, so no one is responsible and many children fall through the cracks? For sure, not Linda. She knew much better. But she just lived with the decisions and did what she could to make sure kids were helped, not hurt, and then tried to make lemonade out of lemons. Boy, are we going to miss her! I hope she’s appreciated more at her next gig!

  • http://cityeventscalendar.org Calendar of Events

    I wish I had found this before. :(

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