Office of Special Education Programs

[laughs] Um, 2016, there was an article from the Houston Chronicle, came out and it was basically highlighting that Texas practitioners were avoiding putting kids in special education.

And the OSEP wrote to the Commissioner of Education very concerned about these articles, and cited the articles as a reason for their concern.

And by 2018, we were in corrective action.

What ...

Just kind of trying to balance these two laws seem a little contradictory, but I think that's things that the state is still working on helping us understand.

Um, and then there, another problem was that we're using RTI to delay an evaluation.

Of course, there was a memo from OSEP to all of the LEAs across the United States that y- that was a problem everywhere, that people were using RTI to delay.

And then finally, they didn't directly say it, but there are a lot of sort of references and inferences, um, to the way we were doing evaluations.

And it just felt so good.

And then, yeah, we got this email, uh, as a lot of institutions did, um, 'cause it was the Office of Special Education Programming through the Department of Education.

So OSEP sent that email to the, um, research lead, and it said, "We are terminating your grant.

Uh, one year in, you still have four years of it, but we decided that this is no longer worth our time and money and investment." And, um, you know, we worked hard to try to get that reinstated.

That's the important part.

So what happened is, uh, the Office of Special Education Programs at the US Department of Education, they issue these things called guidance letters or guidance memos.

Mm-hmm.

And so they had a guidance memo in 1990.