Orange County School of the Arts leaders offered Santa Ana Unified School District $4 million to settle its ongoing lawsuit against the district.
In 2019, OCSA was among four charter schools under the SAUSD umbrella that the district argued owed funds that should have been paid toward districtwide special education programs, per state law. Most recently, OCSA appealed a recent judge’s ruling that it should have to pay the district $16 million with interest and sought mediation with SAUSD.
Related: Six years on, OC School of the Arts and Santa Ana Unified continue in court over special ed funding
“Because we have been unsuccessful in getting the school district to offer to go back to mediation, despite hundreds of people requesting it in public comment for the last several meetings, we took matters into our own hands and wanted to put an offer on the table publicly,” said Teren Schaffer, president and CEO of OCSA.
SAUSD spokesperson Fermin Leal said the district is reviewing the document provided by OCSA, but he could not confirm whether it was a deal that the district would accept or even consider at this point.
The charter school, which serves middle and high school students interested in arts, opened in 2000 under the umbrella of Santa Ana Unified. As part of the arrangement, the charter school, OCSA, hired its own special education staff and provided services to its students, invoicing the district for those costs.
According to OCSA officials, the charter school was reimbursed about $8.8 million for special education services provided to students, and SAUSD kept more than $11 million in additional revenue.
In 2020, the arts school left SAUSD and moved under the Orange County Board of Education.
“They collected an excess of $11.5 million on our behalf that we didn’t utilize for serving the needs of special education students,” Schaffer said. “That’s money that they got to keep for their own use, as they desired. When you take the $4 million offer and combine it with the $11.5 million that they’ve already retained, that gets us to approximately the $16 million that they say we owe.”
OCSA officials said three judges have weighed in on the legal dispute so far, two of whom sided with the charter school. SAUSD moved the case out of Orange County and into Los Angeles County, where it remains today.
Leal, in a statement, said that a trial court rejected in February 2023 OCSA’s argument that SAUSD received a “windfall” in special education funding from the charter school.
“SAUSD was not the one that filed this lawsuit in 2019,” Leal said. “SAUSD would still prefer to reach a reasonable settlement of this case rather than continue to litigate.”
The district remains open to finding solutions that best serve the charter school and the district, Leal added.
“But we also want to ensure that the district is compensated, as required by law, for the services for our special education students,” Leal said. “We continue to look at all the options, but we also want to make sure that we are able to provide our students with the resources they need.”
The district has until May 21 to respond to OCSA’s offer.