Happy Birthday!! Missouri DESE's Section 504 Guidance Turns 22 This Month!

It was 22 years ago this month that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MO DESE) published their Section 504 Guidance for Missouri School Districts.

As of January 2015, MO DESE's guidance hasn't been updated since January 1993. That's pretty amazing!!

Section 504 is a civil rights statute which prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities. Section 504 is enforced (supposedly) by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

I say "supposedly" because the Kansas City Office for Civil Rights has allowed the Fox C-6 School District to remain non-compliant with the Resolution Agreement that assistant superintendent Dan Baker signed on May 1, 2009 for nearly 6 years. OCR sent 4 monitoring letters to the district between December 2009 and May 2013 detailing what the district needed to do in order to become compliant with the May 1, 2009 Resolution Agreement.

Allowing a school district to remain non-compliant for nearly 6 years DOES NOT give the appearance of enforcement. In 2010, I asked attorneys at OCR handling our complaint if they thought the district would fulfill the Resolution Agreement before my child graduated. The attorney laughed when he told me that OCR has been monitoring some Resolution Agreements for nearly 10 years. It seems that OCR's interpretation of enforcement is quite different than what most people would consider enforcement of the law.

Both the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) each have an Office for Civil Rights.

Any school district that accepts federal funds is required to comply with Section 504 and the ADA AA or they risk losing their federal funds.

School districts are not funded for Section 504 like they are for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) so there is no incentive for school districts to implement Section 504 other than the risk of losing their federal funds. Therfore, it's pretty easy to see why it's been so difficult for parents in the state of Missouri to obtain 504 Plans for their children that are eligible.

Each year Missouri DESE is required to sign an assurance agreement with the USDA's Food Nutrition Services (FNS) division stating that they will comply with Section 504 law and USDA's Regulations and Guidelines. 

School districts in Missouri sign an assurance agreement each year with Missouri DESE stating they will comply with Section 504 and the USDA's Regulations and Guidelines and MO DESE is responsible for ensuring that the school districts in Missouri properly follow the law.

Missouri DESE not being able to update their guidance in 22 years reminds me of the same problem that's gone on at Fox C-6 for the last decade. Fox hasn't able to update their board Policies and Regulations for nearly a decade other than the ones required by state statute.

Even though Fox was required by law to update their policies, it didn't always get done properly. In 2011, I pointed out to Fox's Board of Education that the district's new Allergy Prevention and Response Policy that was adopted in June 2011 didn't meet state law. Of course, Fox's former superintendent Dianne Brown-Critchlow and assistant superintendent Dan Baker argued with me that it did meet state law and that the district's attorneys approved the policy and so did the board.

Eventually Dan Baker resubmitted the Allergy Prevention and Response policy to Fox's Board of Education (BOE) in November 2011 and it was re-adopted at the December 2011 board meeting.

The original policy submitted by Dan Baker to Fox's BOE stated that the District "will develop a policy" and was only 8 sentences long. The model policy from the state was 4 pages long.

I sent a copy of Mehlville's policy (where Dianne Brown's brother was an administrator) to the board as an example of what the policy was supposed to include. This is just another example of how getting things done at Fox has been a burden for the last decade.

Back to Missouri DESE's Section 504 Guidance, if you search Missouri DESE's website for "Section 504", the first document listed in the search results is the one linked to below.

Missouri DESE's Section 504 Guidance
(January 1993)

The second document is MO DESE's Section 504 Coordinator Responsibilities Guide which is the document linked to below:

Missouri DESE's Section 504 Coordinator Responsibilities

Nowhere is it stated in MO DESE's Section 504 Guidance that Section 504 prohibits retaliation for filing an OCR complaint or for advocating for a right protected by the law, and harassment of students or others because of a disability as it does in South Dakota's Section 504 Guidance that was written in 2010.

I highly recommend downloading South Dakota's Department of Education's Section 504 Guidance document. Compare it to the document that Missouri DESE has on their website. It's a night and day difference!

South Dakota Department of Education's Section 504 Guidance (2010)

In 2009, Missouri DESE talked about updating the document when my wife discussed it with Missouri DESE's former Compliance Officer. The document on MO DESE's website is the same one that my wife downloaded in 2008. Obviously it never got updated.

Our district didn't need Missouri DESE's Section 504 Guidance because they were trained on Section 504 by Fox's former law firm and there was usually training every year at the Annual School Law Seminars sponsored by some of Missouri's law firms that specialize in education related law.

If you are a parent in Missouri looking for information on Section 504, don't bother looking at Missouri DESE's guidance. Go download the Section 504 guidance from South Dakota. It puts Missouri's guidance to shame. Other states have similar documents that are up to date like South Dakota's so you may find others that are even better.

Perhaps someone at MO DESE will read this article and start working on updating the state's guidance on Section 504 considering that it was written 16 years before the 2009 ADA Amendment Act!

Why Does Transparency Cost So Much? (Updated)

On Wednesday July 30, 2014, I submitted a Sunshine request for documents to the Fox C-6 School District for the settlement agreements for Superintendent Critchlow and Assistant Superintendent Dan Baker and his wife Angela Burns Baker as well as the Credit Card Statements for 2013-2014, recent Board Meeting Minutes (with individual votes of board members made in Closed Session) and copies of the Contracts for all Central Office Administrators.

By law the district has until the close of business Monday August 4th to respond to my request. It will be interesting to see what the district's response is now that Superintendent Crutchley is Fox's acting superintendent. In the past, many of my Sunshine requests were met with high dollar fees to obtain documents. Many of the documents I paid for such as board packets should have been published on the district's website for free as they do in most school districts our size.

Update! Monday August 4, 2014

Fox C-6 Provides Documents from Sunshine Request

For Free!

Charging for documents that should be freely available to the public gives the impression that someone in our school district does NOT want that information made public. The same goes for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MO DESE) as well.

For several months I've been requesting copies of the 2013-2014 credit card statements from Fox C-6. The district spent more than $2 Million dollars last year using credit cards without supplying the credit card statements to our school board in their board packets for approval each month. So board members had no way of knowing what the money was being spent on unless they asked.

Superintendent Critchlow was in charge when I first requested copies of the credit card statements. The response I received from Fox's custodian of records was that the district wanted to charge me about $170 for those documents. The credit card statements should have been included in the board packets each month like they are in the Affton School District where Fox's new Chief Financial Officer previously worked.

For the majority of the 2013-2014 school year, school board members were asked to approve payments each month for 3 different credit cards without being provided the statements for the credit cards.

Similarly, Bill Payments reports for checks still don't list a description of what each payment is for. Board President John Laughlin says this will be fixed in the near future. This should have been a red flag for our school board and the community considering that the district has financial issues. It's a very good reason why our school board should request a state audit of the Fox C-6 School District.

The easiest way to keep the information out of the public's view is to charge a fee that's high enough to deter you from obtaining the data. If a government body doesn't want someone to have that information, they simply up the fees to an amount that only the news media can afford to pay. News media will pay for information if they think they may find something that might make for a good story and bring in some advertising dollars. Your average citizen isn't going to fork over hundreds of dollars to check up on what's going on in their school district when the information should have been freely available to begin with. Our school board should make sure that information is freely available to the public.

School board meeting packets weren't published on the district's website until board members John Laughlin and Steve Holloway stepped in to get that done last year. So I know there are at least two board members that are interested in making sure our school district is transparent.

When I made a Sunshine request for the credit card statements from Fox C-6 earlier this spring, the district asked me to pay nearly $170 to lookup and copy 9 months of statements for the district credit cards. District credit cards are given to some administrators, directors and to some Family and Consumer Science (FACS) teachers in the district. Credit cards allow them to make quick purchases and/or payments when needed without having to necessarily generate a purchase order. Without credit card statements there can't be any accountability on how tax dollars are being spent.

The estimate from the district's custodian of records (who is also our superintendent's secretary) was 5.5 hours to locate the credit card statements and redact them and another 0.5 hour to make copies of the documents.

Don't let it worry you that the district spent more than $2 million dollars using credit cards during the 2013-2014 school year. I knew the district was paying electric bills using credit cards because the Bill Payments for checks never had payments to Ameren until recently. So that would account for roughly $130,000 to $145,000 each month.

It's easy to understand that the district wanted to get "cash back" from using credit cards to pay for things because every dollar counts when your trying to put your money into the classroom as Superintendent Critchlow would always tell me. But, without proper oversight of what is being purchased using credit cards by our school board raises concerns. Someone could easily take advantage of the lack of accountability and your tax dollars might get used improperly. The Fox C-6 community is now learning how a lack of oversight can allow for things to occur that should not.

So, when your school district wants to charge you quite a bit of money for something that should have already been provided to your school board members each month for free, you get the feeling someone is trying to hide something. If the district has nothing to hide, the district should have waived the fees for my Sunshine requests considering this information was for the public's interest.


MO DESE Charges For Sunshine Requests As Well
In the case of MO DESE, the state requested $1305 to research and supply correspondence between the Fox C-6 School District or its attorneys and Missouri DESE Food Nutrition Services (FNS) and the USDA's Food Nutrition Services (FNS) Office for Civil Rights between the months of September 2013 and March 2014 in connection with a specific complaint.

Not only did the fee seem awfully high, but MO DESE had previously fulfilled a similar Sunshine request for nearly 2 years of the same information dating back to August 2011 for FREE!

Being asked to pay $1305 for 7 months of correspondence when nearly 2 years of correspondence was previously provided for FREE makes a person wonder why it now costs so much especially given the fact that MO DESE already identified the number of items that it would be providing.

Could it be that the documents being requested during this time period would have included correspondence from USDA FNS OCR informing the state that Fox C-6 needed to be brought into compliance with federal law and regulations or risk losing federal funding of the school nutrition program?

Fox C-6 and MO DESE were found non-compliant with federal law and USDA guidelines and regulations in August 2011. However, the district nor DESE did anything to become compliant between August 2011 and August 2013.

So, the fees for obtaining information for this period of time could have been due to MO DESE or Fox C-6 not wanting this information released to the public. Superintendent Dianne Critchlow and Assistant Superintendent Dan Baker had been adamantly insisting for years at school board meetings and in news articles that Fox C-6 had been properly following the law relative to Section 504 and the ADA. But now, Fox was being told by Missouri DESE FNS that the district needed to comply with federal law and USDA OCR's regulations and guidelines because the district had signed an assurance agreement with the state that they would.

Below is the Sunshine request response received from MO DESE's legal counsel on March 11, 2014.

Sunshine Request Response from Missouri DESE 

March 11, 2014 

This office has completed a preliminary search of documents conforming to your request in the following areas:

• All correspondence  between Missouri DESE and the USDA FNS OCR with regards to USDA Complaint #09-3616 against the Fox C-6 School District or its attorney from September 2013 to March 4, 2014.

• All correspondence between Missouri DESE and the Fox C-6 School District with regards to USDA Complaint #09-3616 against the Fox C-6 School district or its attorney from September 2013 March 4, 2014. 

The preliminary search using the search terms “USDA and 09-3616,” “USDA and OCR” and “USDA and Fox” has identified approximately 1,213 items. It is estimated that retrieval and production of these items will require a minimum of 60 hours of staff time, at a cost of $1,305. Per your request, I am providing notice of this cost prior to initiating the final production of these documents. If you wish to narrow the scope of your request, please contact me. Otherwise, this work will begin upon receipt of payment. Payment should be made to the Treasurer, State of Missouri and forwarded to this office. You will be billed for any remaining costs at the time the documents are produced.

Please contact me if you have any questions regarding the estimate or this response.

Mark Allan Van Zandt
General Counsel

I had made numerous Sunshine requests to MO DESE prior to the above request for various things such as salary information. MO DESE typically responded within a day and I was never charged for the information. MO DESE had always been very open and willing to provide the information.

And as noted above, a previous request was made to MO DESE for the same information over a longer period of time and that information was supplied for FREE.

So, why all of a sudden was there a huge charge for 7 months of information compared to the previous Sunshine request?

Do governmental bodies think that we're not paying attention?

Charging large fees for information gives the impression that someone doesn't want you to have the information you're requesting. By making the information too expensive for a citizen watchdog makes it very easy to hide facts from the public.

March 18, 2014 Fox C-6 School Board Meeting Presentation to Outgoing Board Members

At the March 18, 2014 Fox C-6 school board meeting, Assistant Superintendent Tim Crutchley filling in for Superintendent Dianne Critchlow while she is out on FMLA thanked outgoing school board members Linda Nash and Dan Smith and presented them with small thank you gifts for their service to the Fox C-6 School District.

Below is an audio recording of Mr. Crutchley's presentation. He mentioned some of the accomplishments of the school district while they served the community on the school board. Mrs. Nash served for 12 years and Mr. Smith served for 6 years. Mr. Smith and Mrs. Nash both spoke after being recognized by Mr. Crutchley.

Listen to Mr. Crutchley's Presentation and Mr. Smith and Mrs. Nash

One of the facts that Mr. Crutchley mentioned was Fox's Average Composite ACT Score at 1:22 into the recording.  He said that,

"The district's ACT Average is over 23 while the state average is 21."

Below I have posted the ACT report found on Fox's District Report Card page on Missouri DESE's website to compare them to what Mr. Crutchley reported. It's always interesting to compare the real numbers to what is reported by district administrators.

The highest score posted for Fox was a 22.7 in 2011. The average for the state has remained pretty steady at 21.6.

Mr. Crutchley didn't mention Fox's Percentage of Graduates Tested. I've asked them for several years why this number is so low and have been given several different reasons. I always get asked why the number is so low when I tell people what Fox's Percentage of Students taking the ACT is as reported by Missouri DESE.

Fox's Percentage of Student's taking the ACT places our district in the bottom 25% of the state. That number will change in 2015 when ALL 11th graders will be required to take the ACT when it becomes part of the state assessment. Fox's Composite ACT score will most likely drop some once all student's are required to take the ACT.

Requiring all students across the state to take the ACT will help provide a good statewide comparison of college readiness.

Fox C-6 School District Report Card at Missouri DESE

Fox and Missouri ACT Data

District: FOX C-6 Year # Grads # Grads at or above Nat. Avg. % of Grads at or above Nat Avg % of Grads Tested Composite ACT Score 2013 789 298 37.80 55.89 22.3 2012 845 320 37.90 55.98 22.3 2011 854 327 38.30 53.28 22.7 2010 893 315 35.30 53.98 22.2 2009 878 292 33.30 57.06 21.7 2008 904 299 33.10 55.97 21.8 2007 808 256 31.70 51.49 21.7 2006 777 227 29.20 46.59 21.7 2005 697 170 24.40 47.78 20.8 2004 680 170 25.00 49.71 20.7

District: MISSOURI Year # Grads # Grads at or above Nat. Avg. % of Grads at or above Nat Avg % of Grads Tested Composite ACT Score 2012 61,599 23,129 37.50 66.82 21.6 2011 63,013 22,698 36.00 64.25 21.6 2010 64,058 22,623 35.30 63.42 21.6 2009 62,787 21,547 34.30 61.94 21.6 2008 61,894 21,614 34.90 63.03 21.6 2007 60,201 20,893 34.70 61.77 21.6 2006 58,474 19,663 33.60 59.71 21.6 2005 57,843 19,506 33.70 59.88 21.6 2004 58,040 19,192 33.10 59.18 21.5