This post is an addendum to the launch of the Consent Report Tracker, which you can read all about here. As I was testing different ways to process and organize the publicly available data, I came across two things that deserve their own corner of the discussion. One is very difficult to fix, the other should be relatively easy.

First: A Structural Problem with Calling Things “Special Education”

It's no secret that expenses classified as "Special Education"¹ (SpEd for short) make up a large piece of OUSD's budget. In the consent reports alone, they're about a quarter of all the spending the tracker has counted since 2019.² I plan to do a deep-dive on this in a future post, but for now I want to point out something that's plain to see in this data: the category has so many components that the term is almost meaningless in its current state.

Most district spending isn't filed under one catch-all label like "General Education." "Special Education" is. It lumps everyday kinds of support that would go unnoticed anywhere else, like staff to cover leaves and vacancies, mental health staff at schools, and transportation for students attending school far from their neighborhoods,³ in with the supports that are unique to students with particular disability-related needs.

So the number looks big because we set aside and label everything that touches a child with an IEP as "Special Education." We don't take the time to understand exactly what's being provided, how it connects to what's provided as "General Education," or why it's being done through contracts with private entities.

That one number ends up looking so large that it gets weaponized by people who believe funds are being badly mismanaged. The discussion is center-stage right now, while the district is planning to put $14.7 million less from its general fund toward "Special Education" this year,⁴ and with a school board election less than a month away.⁵

"Special Education" items are both supremely important and the worst-tracked spending in this data. The biggest share goes to contracts with nonpublic schools and agencies, and the official text for most of them says little more than "to provide Special Education services."⁶ I've sorted it into sub-categories as best I can, but the public record is infuriatingly opaque, and there are very few clean lines between what's called "Special Education" and "General Education." Please read any SpEd number with that in mind. We can't have real accountability without improving the way we classify and track these things, and it's more or less impossible to do under the current system.

Then: Grace for Human Error

While using AI to calculate actual numbers from the text, I found ten (largely minor) discrepancies between the public record and the contracts it describes.⁷ I couldn't work out why they were there from what's public, so I compiled them into a letter to the Board of Education's staff, which I've posted publicly here.

A few are concerning, but none of it points to impropriety in my reading; it all looks like normal human typographical error. Still, the public record is important, so I'm passing it all along as a friendly request to fix it up when there's time.

Legistar is a strange, borderline-unusable beast, but it's our beast, so we gotta tend to it as best we can!