TEA to repay $2.5M special ed contract

Concerns had been raised by parents from the beginning of no-bid deal awarded in 2017

The U.S. Department of Education has asked Texas to repay more than $2.5 million after state auditors found the agency violated purchasing rules when it awarded a multimillion-dollar nobid contract to a group tasked with collecting data about special education students.

In emails sent to Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath and Texas Education Agency Director of Special Education Justin Porter, an audit facilitator with the federal department’s Office of Special Education Programs said the costs associated TEA’s 2017 $4.4 million contract with the Atlanta-based company SPEDx were “not reasonable,” and that the agency did not use “reasonable methods to protect personally identifiable information” of disabled students.

Although TEA paid SPEDx more than $2.5 million in federal funds allocated through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, state auditors found only about $150,000 worth of work was completed.

“Most of the IDEA funds paid to SPEDx under the contract provided no benefit to the IDEA program, and, therefore, were not allocatable to the IDEA program under the cost principles of the Uniform Guidance,” Audit Facilitator Susan Kauffman wrote in a May 13 email.

In a statement, TEA officials wrote that Commissioner Morath canceled the contract well before its completion date because it lacked support from parents and educators.

“TEA shares the primary objective of leveraging federal special education funds to provide impactful, high quality services to students with disabilities,” the statement said. “TEA will work with the U.S. Department of Education to ensure that resolution of this issue does not in any way come at the expense of services to Texas students with disabilities.”

The statement also said the

agency had updated its procedures and additional oversight put in place to ensure “errors like these do not reoccur.”

The federal decision largely is based off the findings of the Texas

State Auditor’s Office, which showed TEA officials failed to check SPEDx's security controls, potentially jeopardizing the data of thousands of special education students statewide. The agency also failed to mention a professional relationship between a top TEA official and a SPEDx subcontractor, state auditors wrote.

Parents and special education advocates had raised concerns about contract from the time it was awarded in May 2017, until TEA Commissioner Mike Morath canceled it that December. TEA auditors originally dismissed those concerns in December 2017, saying in a memo “the accusations could not be substantiated, and the complainant's charges were made without basis and were not supportable.”

Dustin Rynders, supervising attorney for Disability Rights Texas’ education team, said the U.S. Department of Education’s decision confirmed that the SPEDx contract was flawed from the beginning.

“I also think TEA is consistently in a position to put out additional requests for proposals and contracts, I hope they learned lesson from this failed contract attempt and that money will be used to benefit students going forward,” Rynders said.