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FORMER KENTUCKY EDUCATION COMMISSIONER TO HEAD U.S. SPECIAL ED PROGRAMS

December 16, 1999

The U.S. Department of Education has tapped a longtime state special education administrator to take over as chief of the Office of Special Education Programs. Kenneth Warlick, former associate commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Education, is slated to take the post in Washington Jan. 3. He will oversee the department's $5.3 billion budget for programs that administer the 1997 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Among his biggest challenges when he first takes office, however, may be to continue growing the IDEA programs with less money than Congress earmarked for the department this fall.

Warlick takes the new post as the Department of Education is in the midst of searching for ways to cut $112 million from the $35.591 billion Congress allocated for all federal education programs. As reported, the cut is part of a 0.38 percent across-the-board budget cut that must be made in all federal spending programs by early February to keep the 2000 budget under spending caps. The IDEA programs were allocated $6 billion for fiscal 2000, up $700 million from this year's budget and from the freeze request President Clinton submitted early last year. Since Clinton did not see the need for more than the $5.3 billion he requested, and since the Department of Education is part of Clinton's executive branch, some are expecting the IDEA allocation to be a candidate for the budget knife.

Beyond managing money, Warlick's responsibility is to continue developing and administering programs to serve the 6 million students in kindergarten through grade 12 receiving special ed. services. He spent seven years doing the same thing for 88,000 students with special needs in the state of Kentucky, as associate commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Education and head of the Office of Special Instructional Services and the Office of Learning Programs Development from 1991 to 1998. While with Special Instructional Services, Warlick designed a plan to improve relations between the state education department and its child-parent advocacy groups, and he led an initiative to revise the state's special education code.

In 1998, Warlick moved to the University of Kentucky, where he was director of the Inclusive Large Scale Standards and Assessment Group in Lexington. There he has focused on the issue of alternate assessment, helping develop alternate assessment principles in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Tennessee.

Warlick will take over for Patricia Guard, who has been acting director of OSEP since August, when the last politically appointed director, Tom Hehir, left the post for a position at Harvard University.8