NJ's special education ombudsman has not filed annual reports, as required by law

New Jersey's 245,000 K-12 students with learning disabilities suffered disproportionately during the pandemic days of remote learning, but just how much is impossible to assess, as the Department of Education has not released crucial annual reports, required by law.

The department has yet to release a report from the 2020-21 academic year, when it launched unprecedented measures in response to the pandemic that required students to deal with masks, remote learning and, in many cases, a greater risk of contracting COVID-19, all while keeping up with their schoolwork.

A 2016 law championed by Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz, D-Essex, created the key position of special education ombudsman within the Department of Education. The ombudsman is required to be a liaison for families of children with disabilities, support and provide information to parents, and identify patterns in complaints received by the state that pertain to special education rights and services.

That law also required the ombudsman to write and submit an annual report with recommendations about the state’s education services.

The 2020-21 special education ombudsman’s report is “under review” and not ready to be released, said Shaheed Morris, a spokesperson for the Education Department.

The report has been under review for more than a year, according to the Education Law Center, a watchdog and advocacy group for vulnerable students. Open Public Records Act requests filed by the group and shared with NorthJersey.com date to Sept. 14, 2021, when schools returned to in-person learning for the first time since the pandemic closures. The state has extended the center’s OPRA requests for the report more than 13 times since the original request.

“This annual report is crucial for understanding the state of special education in New Jersey, and it’s required by law. If we don’t have a clear picture of issues in special education, how can we fix them?” said Elizabeth Athos, attorney for educational equity at the Education Law Center. She said it is “simply disgraceful” that the Department of Education “hasn’t been able to produce a single report in any of the six years since the law took effect.”

NorthJersey.com and The Record requested the report, but it was not provided. When pressed for comment, the spokesperson for the department said "the report with the data for the 2019-2020 time period is being finalized and should be available in the near future."

The special education ombudsman position remained empty until 2019, though the state said in a statement that it made efforts to hire someone. It was filled in 2019 by Cynthia Hoenes-Saindon, whose office has not produced any reports.

Meanwhile, another ombudsman, also hired by the Murphy administration and with a similar mandate, has produced a report every year since 2018. The annual report for 2020 by the ombudsman for individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities and their families included information on how the pandemic affected children receiving special education in public schools.

That report looks at the state of children and adults served by different state agencies and departments, but many families, "particularly within the disability community, discovered that virtual learning and virtual therapy just does not work for their children,” wrote the ombudsman and author, Paul Aronsohn.

“Heartbreaking” stories emerged about children regressing and engaging in more “self-injurious behavior” as working parents juggled virtual learning and caregiving. And despite a 2021 law that gave these special education students an extended school year for compensatory education, many parents were disappointed that there were few “in-person” special education programs in 2020, the report said.

“What is the governor doing to help special needs students? Four months into the pandemic and no school for our most vulnerable population,” a parent said early in the pandemic, in July 2020, as quoted in Aronsohn’s report.

At the time, the state was planning for how to open schools during the pandemic. “Our students are experiencing severe regression and a lack of learning. Many of our children will suffer from severe behaviors going back to school as their world will again shift dramatically. It will take months to get them back on track when school begins. …Parents are doing their best, but we are not a replacement for the teachers that have specialized training. We cannot provide that level of teaching,” the unnamed parent said.

Around 23,000 children have autism, and an additional 14,000 have “multiple disabilities.” More than 50,000 students between ages 3 and 21 have speech or language impairments, according to that report.

The Education Department did not say why the reports have not been published. They would include the 2020 report that would likely focus on the pandemic.

It also isn't clear why Aronsohn operates with a higher degree of independence and reports directly to the governor’s office. His position is “in but not of” the Department of Treasury. He is paid $119,540 a year, according to datauniverse.com. His annual report was based on hundreds of daily interactions and visits with people receiving services. Hoenes-Saindon, on the other hand, is an employee of the Education Department and is paid $54,874 a year.

Education advocates said one problem at the Education Department is staffing, with key positions left empty in the past two or three years.

Kevin Dehmer, a former assistant commissioner and chief financial officer at the Department of Education, left for a Rutgers University job in late October. Eleven of the 13 sitting members on the all-volunteer State Board of Education occupy expired positions, and three new nominees have yet to be confirmed. An unofficial system called “senatorial courtesy” has prevented confirmation of the department’s head, acting Commissioner Angela Allen-McMillan.

The loss of staff at the Education Department is still a “large problem” despite a recent uptick in hires, said Mary McKillip, a researcher at the Education Law Center who analyzed staffing data between 2018 and 2022.

A “disproportionate number” of those staffers were in higher-level positions, and their leaving was “a tremendous loss of institutional knowledge,” she said. The number of staffers fell from 620 to 552 between 2018 and 2022, the center said.

“I don’t think there are enough hands on deck at the Department of Education to handle the amount of work that these folks are doing on a day-to-day basis,” State Board of Education member Joseph Ricca said about the delay in the report. “This is very complex work, very time-intensive, and also requires highly skilled people to do it.” He said the state government is working to fill positions throughout the department and that people working there are dedicated but the state needs to help them do their jobs.

“The department needs to be functioning at 100%,” he said. “Stability matters.” Whether it's about expired terms on the board he sits on or acting positions in the department’s “leadership,” he said, they need to be addressed immediately by the Murphy administration.

The governor’s office had not commented on why the reports were not released or whether they have been filed. Ruiz, who championed the special education ombudsman law, did not comment.

The Education Department's "capacity is the weakest I’ve seen since I’ve been doing this work,” said Peg Kinsell, longtime head of SPAN advocacy, a group that addresses disability issues in children. Big programmatic changes, accountability and monitoring are "hard when you don’t have a lot of staff," she said.

However, "If the developmental disabilities ombudsman can write a robust report on his minimal staff across the population that he has to be an ombudsman for, I don’t see where the department can use that as an excuse that they are understaffed,” Kinsell said.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Why has NJ failed to release special education report required by law?