Agency Plans Hearings on Remedial Classes for Parochial Students

U.S. Department of Education officials will hold hearings March 24 and 25 into the San Diego Unified School District’s six-month feud with Catholic school leaders over remedial reading and math instruction for parochial school students, a department official said Friday.

The hearings are the first scheduled anywhere in the country in the wake of a July decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that changed the way public schools must offer remedial education to low-income students at private schools, said Bill Lobosco, acting deputy director of compensatory education programs for the Education Department.

The hearings are the first step in a lengthy process that could end up costing the city schools control of the remedial instruction program, Lobosco said.

Federal law requires all public school systems to provide remedial instruction to eligible poor students at private schools. But last summer the Supreme Court ruled that public school teachers may not enter the sectarian schools’ classrooms to provide the instruction.

The ruling sent public-school officials across the nation scrambling to find alternatives. In other cities, private-school students are being tutored in temporary classrooms leased by public school systems and at “neutral sites” near the sectarian schools.

San Diego Unified School District officials have decided to teach 1,243 private-school students--the vast majority of them in 12 Catholic schools--in old school buses converted to mobile classrooms. District officials say that their proposed fleet of 12 buses complies with the federal law. The district has purchased nine buses and is sending five to parochial schools each day.

But the California Catholic Conference has asked the federal government to step in, claiming that most parochial school students still receive no help and that the buses provide an inadequate teaching environment.

Because the two sides “have been unable to come to an agreement on services being equitable,” three federal officials will hold hearings next month to decide the issue, Lobosco said.

If the panel agrees with the Catholic schools, U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett could eventually strip the city schools of control of the remedial program and turn it over to a nonprofit corporation, Lobosco said. Such a “bypass” would cost the school district some of the $10 million it spends to offer the same remedial help to its own students, he said.

The bypass could not take effect until the next school year, Lobosco said.

“We’d like nothing better than for the local district to work out a solution with the private schools, and have both agree that services are equitable,” Lobosco said. “That would be the best solution.”

The school district has postponed purchase of the final three buses while it awaits state and federal approval for the plan, said R. Linden Courter, assistant director of the school district’s external funding department.