Lulu Ramadan reports:
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Seattle Times.
A King County judge ruled last week that a private special education school that has been the subject of a recent Seattle Times and ProPublica investigation has to comply with public information laws and release records to the Times.
The ruling has the potential to shed light on an obscure part of Washington’s special education system, in which school districts send students with disabilities to private programs at taxpayer expense. Few other legal rulings have defined how the state’s public records laws apply to private organizations that assume the functions of government agencies.
The special education schools operate with little state oversight and aren’t required to disclose key data, like discipline rates or test scores, as traditional public schools are.
[…]
Messitt used a four-pronged legal assessment, known as the Telford test, to judge whether the private school was subject to public records.
Read more at ProPublica.
h/t, Joe Cadillic