HCPSS MPIA Request #2019-033

Requested Information
I am requesting all policies and information on reading specialists working or not directly working with children with IEPs in their role as reading specialists. Also I would like the number of reading assistants for each elementary school and middle school over the past five school years.
Date Received
Status
Complete
Responsive Documents
Responsive to this request, no guidelines or policies exist on reading specialists working or not directly working with children with IEPs. The attached document is part of a presentation made by the HCPSS Department of Special Education (DSE) to Reading Specialists in 2017 and contains guidance shared at the time. Both the DSE and the HCPSS Curriculum Office indicate Reading Specialists would work with individual students based on need, and may attend IEP meetings or work with an IEP team when identified as a support needed for that student.
Number of reading assistants per school, clarified to include all reading positions. The attached breakdown is for filled instructional/support positions as funded by reading budgets by school over the past three years. Please note, these totals may not include individual positions which, although fall outside assigned reading budget categories, may also be utilized by individual schools on an as needed basis to support reading efforts. Additional breakdowns of the types of positions contained in the Reading Elementary (1802) and Reading Secondary (1803) budgets can be found in the Approved HCPSS Operating Budgets per fiscal year on our website: https://www.hcpss.org/about-us/budgets/budget-archive/. For instance, FY19 summary of positions for these two budgets begins on page 586: https://www.hcpss.org/f/aboutus/budget/fy19/2019-board-approved-operating-budget-revised.pdf. The current system used by Human Resources contains data back to 2016-2017 and that office indicates determining whether they would be able to pull similar breakdowns to the above from an older system would require a skillset outside their normal function. Under the MPIA process, and as advised in the Fourteenth Edition of the Maryland Public Information Act Manual created by Maryland’s Office of the Attorney General, an agency is only obligated to produce existing records and to extract data if it has the capacity to do so “within [its] existing functionality and in the normal course.” The budget documents linked above however contain historical information on positions per year at each level.

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