Vermont Education Secretary Zoie Saunders is second-guessing her attempt to immediately revoke a private therapeutic school’s eligibility for public funds after its attorney submitted a lengthy rebuttal to the state.
The I.N.S.P.I.R.E. School for Autism in Brattleboro has been on probation since September. That’s when the state opened a formal investigation after a group of former employees claimed the school had fired them for raising concerns internally about the school’s practices.
A subsequent report, released by state investigators in March, concluded that the school was violating a slew of state regulations, and that its leaders appeared unaware of their basic responsibility to provide students with content-area instruction. Saunders warned the school that it would need to quickly change its practices or lose state funding.
In May, Saunders asked the Council of Independent Schools to support her recommendation to revoke the school’s eligibility for public funding. The advisory panel endorsed her proposal, but failed to properly warn the meeting. By the time it reconvened last week, an attorney for the school, Sean Toohey, had submitted a 75-page document rebutting Saunders’ claims.
I.N.S.P.I.R.E.’s defense rested largely on the argument that the agency was slow to respond during its investigation, and often unclear about what, precisely, the school was doing wrong.
The state has maintained, for example, that despite specializing in autistic students, the school’s curriculum was not tailored to their needs. But the school argued in its letter that the agency was dismissing its “significant efforts” to update the curriculum, and that the instructional materials it had submitted to state investigators demonstrated this.
“If the AOE felt that it was inadequate, it should have responded constructive feedback and given Inspire the chance to clarify,” Toohey wrote in a letter to the council.
And while the state has claimed that the school’s report cards still omit content-area instruction, he said that’s not true. Newly-developed reports cards do in fact record student progress on math, science, social studies, English language arts and life skills, Toohey wrote.
Toohey also argued that the school’s new leader should not be blamed for a prior administration’s mistakes. He noted that I.N.S.P.I.R.E.’s board had installed a new leader — Lisa Kuenzler — and that its prior co-director, Karen Steinbeck, had resigned. Brendan Tubbs, who served alongside Steinbeck as co-director, remains on the payroll, but not in a leadership capacity.
“Throughout this process, Inspire has expressed its sincere willingness to acknowledge areas in need of improvement as well as its desire to do whatever is necessary to continue its mission of serving its students,” Toohey wrote.
He also appendesd a letter of support from Tate Erickson, the director of special education for the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union, which serves Brattleboro and surrounding towns. I.N.S.P.I.R.E. had made “noticeable improvements,” Erickson wrote, and was doing a much better job supporting students and communicating with families.
“I have been advocating for systemic improvements at Inspire School for Autism over the past year and a half,” Erickson wrote in his letter. “While cooperating fully with the Vermont Agency of Education’s investigation, I have also consistently advocated that no one is looking for this needed regional program to close.”
Toohey’s letter also sought to discredit the educators who brought their concerns about I.N.S.P.I.R.E. to the state. The group, he wrote, had told administrators that they would only participate in the school’s internal investigation into their concerns if they were provided raises.
The four former I.N.S.P.I.R.E. educators say that’s a lie. Through their own attorney, the group sent a letter to the school Monday demanding a public retraction and threatening to sue.
“The suggestion that these four individuals were seeking to profit from your clients’ abusive behavior is appalling and demonstrably false,” Tim Belcher, a Barre attorney, wrote to the school’s lawyers. Belcher added that the school’s allegation appeared to have been “invented recently,” since the former employees had not heard of it until then.
“Put simply this libel will not stand up in court,” Belcher wrote.
Lyndon Institute headmaster Brian Bloomfield, who serves as the council’s chair, said the panel didn’t wade into the details of the state’s investigation. But I.N.S.P.I.R.E.’s presentation did cast doubts on the accuracy of the agency’s account, he said, and convinced the panel that the school’s new leaders sincerely wanted to come into compliance.
The panel reversed its earlier decision, and instead voted to recommend the school’s probationary period be extended to the end of the year.
“This school was able to persuade the council through the letter from the attorney and the executive director’s talk that they are deeply committed to getting in line with what is required of them,” Bloomfield said. “They just need a little more time to do it.”
The council’s vote is not binding. The State Board of Education has the ultimate say about whether a school can receive public funds. Toren Ballard, a spokesperson for the Agency of Education, said Saunders had not yet made a decision about whether to pursue revocation before the end of the year. She was reviewing the school’s latest filing, he said.
“Our official recommendation to the State Board is to be determined based on our review, which is ongoing right now,” Ballard said.
Schools like I.N.S.P.I.R.E. serve a small population of students but play a critical — and expensive — role in Vermont’s educational landscape. Public school districts are federally required to educate all students within their borders. To serve students with disabilities they cannot accommodate in-house, districts will often pay tuition to specialized therapeutic schools like I.N.S.P.I.R.E., which are often private.
Vermont authorized the Brattleboro school, which can serve up 23 children and adolescents at a time, to charge up to $99,840 per student last school year.
