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The Bells Before the Knell

*All Newspaper Clips in this Blog Series are Attributed to the Archives at the News Journal, where you, too, can purchase a one month membership for access to Journal related papers dating back to the 1800s. http://delawareonline.newspapers.com/?tpa=ZgmgrjZB3AJIJY7Ba7t93Q%3D%3D

Three days before Mazik would learn his efforts were far short of the state's expectation, another unrelated investigation was concluding concerning the care at Au Clair.  Inspectors from New York had once again deemed "the school grossly inadequate" in a preliminary report released to the News Journal by the NY Department's legal affair office.  On Sept. 30, 1979, the Journal released exerts from interviews with one of the evaluators.

New York had cited Au Clair for:
  • Failing to have enough teachers at the school
  • Failure to hire certified teachers
  • Failure to maintain an appropriate group to teacher ration
  • Failure to have enough school supplies and materials to properly educate the students
  • Finding that students would sit idle for up to 40 minutes while the staff worked with other students
  • Failure to employ health and physical experts
  • Failure to have developed long-term plans for students (a NY requirement but not a DE requirement.)
  • Failure to involve parents in individual program planning
  • A requirement in contradiction with the New York/Au Clair contract for care: Parents were being required to make additional payments for medical checkups and other care beyond the $18,000 the State of New York was already paying.
  • Failure to have a speech therapist - even though their descriptive materials claimed they did.
One of the two investigators, Ms. Flagg, noted that Mazik gave no indication that the school was operating without a license, only that he had applied for one. And for the second time in as many year, New York would delist Au Clair.

Mazik did not reply to requests from the News Journal for comment.
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