A private school that receives millions of public dollars to educate some of the District of Columbia’s special education students remains open despite years of complaints about unqualified staff, dirty facilities and lax academic standards.

The D.C. Alternative Learning Academy has been contracted to handle students placed there by D.C. Public Schools for more than a decade. Records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that between October 2005 and this February, the D.C. Alternative Learning Academy received more than $5 million from the city.

This comes after city officials have known for years about the academy’s problems.

» In 2004, the Department of Health fined the academy’s “psychologist” for practicing without a license, records obtained by The Examiner show.

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A 2005 city audit concluded:

» At least one of the school’s four campuses was deemed “unclean.”

» The school billed the District for students for whom they didn’t have documentation or whose authorization to be there at public expense had expired.

» Only three of the 59 teachers on staff could prove they had teaching credentials.

Officials from Alternatives Unlimited, the Baltimore-based parent company of the academy, did not return numerous phone calls seeking comment.

According to enrollment figures kept by the D.C. State Education Office, 11 students attended the academy last fall. The academy has since billed the public schools about $28,000 per child per month, school records show.

The first goal

The academy is just one of hundreds of vendors being paid to help D.C.’s special education students. There are more than 10,000 special education students in D.C. schools. They have problems ranging from mild attention-deficit disorder to physical handicaps.

Under federal law, children can obtain a private education at public expense if they can prove that their public school isn’t up to the task of educating them around the child’s disability.

There are 2,111 such children in the District, according to school records. The D.C. schools spent $114 million on them in fiscal 2006, records show.

Over the past decade, the academy has been paid tens of millions of D.C. taxpayer dollars as a school contractor. Alternatives Unlimited runs similar centers throughout the country and specializes in taking in juvenile delinquents.

One academy official who spoke on condition of anonymity acknowledged that the academy’s first goal isn’t to educate its students.

“Our kids are the ones getting murdered every night,” the official said. “We’re not going to talk to them about the scientific method. That’s not where their heads are at.”

If students will call adults “sir” or “ma’am,” he said, the academy has done its job.

Amid the squalor

Last year, the academy set up shop in the vacant Frederick Douglass Junior High School at 2620 Douglass Road, Southeast. The building swelters in the summer and freezes in the winter because the heating and cooling system doesn’t work. Windows are broken and there is graffiti on the crumbling walls. Dust, clutter and disintegrating plaster abound.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, classes were dismissed and a student was spotted racing to relieve himself on a tree.

For some, the squalor of the Alternative Learning Academy is an indictment of D.C.’s school system.

“They know about these problems, and they don’t care,” former D.C. special education official David McBride said. “They just want to have somewhere to put these kids: a warehouse.”

D.C. public school officials, including special education director Marla Oakes, declined to comment for this story.

McBride, who now helps parents fight through the bureaucracy as a paid special education advocate, toured the academy in 2004 with one of his clients, Lacrisha Butler. He said he was disgusted by what he found.

“We were asking about what books they were using,” McBride recalled. “A kid called out, ‘What books?’

“The computers weren’t plugged in,” McBride said. “They said they had 54 students enrolled. We counted 11 of them. They were supposed to provide lunch. They sent out for pizza.”

McBride, Butler and one of Butler’s friends took their complaints about the academy to the schools.

McBride said special education officials told them that they were proud of the academy, calling it a model “public-private partnership.”

The complaints, McBride said, were ignored.

Too little, too late

McBride and Butler persisted, however, and other city agencies examined the academy. It led to a series of citations and reports — all of which were put in front of schools Supt. Clifford B. Janey, McBride said.

McBride said Janey’s aides told him that the superintendent tried to cancel the academy’s contract last year. But the academy involved its lawyers and remains in business. It is scheduled to host children for summer school.

Even if the school loses its contract, it’s too little, too late to help hundreds of children who already have passed through its doors and relied on the Alternative Learning Academy to educate them, McBride said.

“Many of the kids were sent there because they had no other option,” he said. “These kids are being warehoused there, without any kind of oversight, or follow-up, or interest on the part of D.C. Public Schools.”

bmyers@dcexaminer.com