| districts
and the Department in regard to the plans and applications for funding
presented by the districts, first
in January 2000 for the 2000-2001 school year and, later,
in regards to the post-Abbott VI district
responses, or the lack thereof, regarding
revisions to those plans and applications. They judge the affirmative
responses and developing actions
of the Department to be manifestly deficient and symbolic of an
abject failure to deliver on the Commissioner's past promises and,
perhaps more importantly, to effectively
respond to the commands of the Court. To the extent that
these failures have occurred, they constitute violations of the children's
constitutional rights. |
| To a significant
extent, the ELC's global issues focus upon what it perceives as
the failure of the DOE to require that districts produce for its review
appropriate and necessary information
so that the Department can fully understand the circumstances,
conditions and needs of the districts, their students, their schools
and to the extent involved, the
community-based providers whom the district proposes to use to assist
it in providing preschool to its
students. It asserts that only when armed with such
information and knowledge, along with the information it must itself
gather in order to assess the information
given to it by districts, can the Department properly fulfill the
overarching role the Court so definitively
assigned it. These complaints, while ultimately
grounded in specific allegations of inadequate funding that are properly
resolved in individual district-specific
hearings, are, on the "global" level, largely complaints about
process, complaints that the process used by the districts and the
Department to carry out their mandated
tasks are flawed, so much so that they lead to inadequate or non-
existent planning, review, assessment
and delivery of necessary funding, facilities and
programs to the Abbott children. They are, fundamentally, issues that
address the aftermath of the broad
pronouncements of the Supreme Court, which while mandating
the ultimate roles and responsibilities of the Department and its
district surrogates in delivering
high-quality preschool to Abbott-district children, did not address
the details of exactly how the districts
and the DOE were to carry out their mandates. Thus, the
Department is criticized for failing to properly arrange for and insist
upon the details seen as essential
to the process, such as allegedly failing to require, among other
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