Prince George’s County, State Education Officials Outline special-education monitoring, cite gaps and next steps

Prince George’s County Board of Education audit committee members on Feb. 4 heard a joint presentation from the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) and Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) about how the state and district monitor compliance with special-education law and how the district follows up when monitoring finds problems.

The presentation, led by MSDE Assistant State Superintendent Antoine Hickman and MSDE branch chief Brian Morrison and by Tranel Bowman, PGCPS associate superintendent for special education, walked committee members through Maryland’s monitoring tools, PGCPS’s internal checks and the corrective steps that follow when reviews find noncompliance.

MSDE and PGCPS officials said the monitoring process is intended to check both legal compliance and educational results for students with disabilities, and that the state and district use largely overlapping review rubrics and metrics. MSDE described federal and state requirements it applies to local education agencies, and PGCPS described its own data dashboards, school-level accountability checklists and targeted support plans for schools that fall below district thresholds.

"The federal government requires us, as part of our general supervision process, to conduct comprehensive monitoring ... at least once every six years," said Brian Morrison, branch chief for policy and accountability at MSDE. Morrison described Maryland’s practice of monitoring local education agencies more frequently than the federal minimum, with large districts sometimes reviewed every one to four years depending on their determinations.

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