FOIA Release: Fairfax County Public Schools “Determining Compensatory Education Training Development” Training Videos and Materials Required by Office for Civil Rights

February 10, 2023: Article first published. February 22, 2023: Article updated to include second training video and transcript (see below). *At about the 20-minute mark of the second video below, Dawn Schaefer mentions that one of the points of contact within FCPS is the ombudsman’s office. Not long ago, Kathy Murphy was announced as FCPS’s new “ombuds“. Previously, Kathy was FCPS’s Section 504 expert, in the same office as Dawn and Dawn’s predecessor Jane Strong. Kathy’s name is all over records FCPS provided to OCR for its investigation and seems to have been FCPS’s contact with OCR. In addition, after OCR made its investigation public, Kathy filed a FOIA request with the U.S. Dept. of Education to obtain, among other thing, information on any parents who might have submitted OCR complaints. Jane left the county, Dawn stepped into Jane’s job, and then Kathy disappeared as the 504 Plan expert, only to reappear later as the ombuds.

Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in massive noncompliance for denial of FAPE during April 2020 through June 2022. Following its investigation, OCR entered into a resolution agreement with FCPS. As part of the agreement, FCPS is required to meet with families of the 28,000+ students who were enrolled in FCPS during the time period investigated, to determine compensatory education.

OCR required FCPS to provide training to staff on how to determine compensatory education. You’ll find some of the training records and a video below.

FCPS provided the video and documents below in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for its training materials. It is clear from the video and documents that FCPS withheld some of those materials, hence the FCPS FOIA officer has been contacted on numerous occasions about providing the missing records that are responsive to the FOIA request. As of the publishing of this article (2.10.23), the FOIA officer has yet to acknowledge the request for a full response to the FOIA request.

There are a number of issues with the training that will be addressed in a subsequent article. For now, the information is provided in the interest of ensuring that parents have this in advance of their meetings with FCPS. *Although the FCPS video is on YouTube, FCPS posted it as unlisted, even though one would think that information like this is something it would want to make available to the public, in the interest of being transparent about its response to years of noncompliance.

Click on image below to view full transcript for the video below.