The head of Chicago Public Schools’ Special Education Department stepped down Friday after years of criticism and most recently scathing accusations that the district violated state law in its physical restraint of special education students.
Stephanie Jones had been the chief of the Office of Diverse Learner Supports and Services for four years and worked as a special education teacher for five years prior to that. About 50,000 students in CPS receive special education services for learning, developmental and physical disabilities. Her resignation was effective immediately.
“We sincerely thank her for her commitment to serving students in Chicago with diverse learning needs, and we wish her well in her future endeavors,” CPS CEO Pedro Martinez wrote in a letter to principals Friday.
The district will conduct a national search for her replacement, Martinez said. In the meantime, the department will be led on an interim basis by Richard Smith, a former CPS principal and administrator who once led the Special Education Department.
The change comes a week after the Chicago Teachers Union took a vote of no confidence in Jones and demanded she resign for “dismal failures to protect the district’s most vulnerable students.”
“Tonight our members said, enough,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said in a statement after the vote. “Enough with the lack of services and support, enough with ignoring the needs of our students, and enough with violating state law.”
Special education in CPS has long been troubled.
The department has been overseen by a state monitor since 2018, when a state investigation found CPS had routinely delayed and denied services to special education students.
Just in the past few weeks, it came to light that the Illinois State Board of Education was threatening the district with corrective action over continued violations of state law in its physical restraint practices. The district had continued to allow staff to physically restrain students despite an order to pause restraints until staff are provided training required by law, state officials said.
“CPS’ complete disregard for the health and safety of its students and blatant violation of state law is unconscionable,” ISBE officials told the district.
When asked last week by WBEZ and the Sun-Times about that reprimand and the CTU’s vote of no confidence in Jones, Martinez said, “We’ve been planning significant changes with that department for a while now, for several, several months, way before anything happened this week.”
“CPS has a lot of challenges,” he said in a separate news conference. “We’re going to make sure we meet all the requirements the state has for us this summer before the school year starts.”
Martinez said special education programs would be prioritized in the next school year’s budget, with more teachers and support staff. The details of that budget are expected to be released sometime in the next week. That’s months later than the past few years.
“Not an excuse, but we will make sure that this is corrected,” Martinez said. “Not only that, we’re going to make sure also that the programs get strengthened. This is an area that’s been a challenge in our district for the last two decades, but we’re going to fix it.”
