CPS, archdiocese trade blame as funding runs out for Catholic school special education tutoring

The Archdiocese of Chicago blasted Chicago Public Schools on Friday for sending notice that Catholic school students with disabilities will not get tutoring or other academic support for the rest of the school year.

CPS distributes federal funding for special education services at private schools in the city. District officials said funding was running out for those services at the city’s Catholic schools, meaning some programs couldn’t continue.

The two organizations disagreed about which entity was responsible for managing that spending.

In a statement, CPS officials said the district warned the archdiocese that the schools were overspending.

“The Archdiocese exercised its independent authority to reallocate its remaining funds,” the district said. “Any claim that the District has remained unresponsive or uncooperative is patently false and ignores months of direct consultation.”

Chicago’s Catholic Schools Supt. Greg Richmond said CPS officials are the ones who “determine which students are eligible.”

“They determine how much of that service the students get. They control the budget. They run this program,” Richmond said. “Something went wrong this year where they spent more money than they had, and they ran out of money two months early, apparently. And we're asking them to fix it.

“Our focus right now is just to do anything possible so that these kids keep getting the services they deserve,” he said.

More than 800 students were getting academic support at the Catholic schools, and “this will create severe hardship” for them, the archdiocese said in a statement. Students will continue to get speech and social work services.

Richmond said it would cost about $1.2 million to continue tutoring and other academic support through the end of the school year. He threatened legal action if the situation is not fixed.

CPS noted that the issue speaks to a bigger problem: Federal funding for special education services has been stagnant for years while the number of students with disabilities has increased, both in public and private schools.

CPS officials said the number of private school students in the programs increases by 200 to 300 every month. Yet the amount of federal funding does not go up.

CPS has a legal obligation to make sure that students with disabilities in the public school system get the services they need. And the school district spends millions of local dollars every year supplementing special education services that the federal funding does not cover.

But “students whose families decide to place them at private or parochial schools do not have the same individual entitlement to the special education and related services they would receive if they were enrolled in public schools,” CPS said in its statement.

Richmond said in the past CPS has made sure that students got special education services through the entire school year and had promised that would happen again this year.

“We rely on them to run the program, and that's what we've done for years,” he said. “We've had a good working relationship with them for years. This is the first time anything like this has happened. It's surprised us a great amount.”