Budget Talk - Special Education
As discussions about the school budget begin, a recurring concern among community members and school officials is the rising expense of special education. While many are aware that special education costs surpass those of general education, few understand the complex factors driving these expenses. Federal mandates, individualized student needs, transportation, and a broken state financing formula all contribute to the financial challenges.
At the heart of this issue is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a federal law guaranteeing students with disabilities the right to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE).
The law requires districts to identify students with disabilities and provide necessary services, regardless of cost. This process begins with extensive testing to determine each student’s needs.
Once testing is complete, a team, defined by IDEA, that includes educators, specialists, and parents, reviews the results to determine if the student qualifies for special education services. If so, an Individualized Education Program (IEP) is crafted to specify the services and supports the student requires, which can range from extra support in the general education classroom to small, specialized classrooms with related services. Importantly, these services are paid for by the district, and the cost can not be considered when determining needed services for a student.
Services for students with complex needs are often more expensive due to smaller class sizes and specialized staff. For example, elementary autism classes may have a ratio of about two students per staff member, compared to roughly 25 students per teacher in a typical classroom.
As needs increase, costs grow accordingly. A student requiring a substantially separate classroom with fewer students and more staff will cost significantly more than a student integrated into the general education setting. However, the state school funding formula currently allocates the same amount of money for any student on an IEP and does not consider actual costs or differentiate based on need.
When districts cannot meet a student’s needs internally, they are legally obligated to fund placements in approved private schools—known as out-of-district (OOD) placements. These placements, which can be day or residential programs, often come with high price tags. Districts are required to cover transportation, and those round-trip expenses to a day school can sometimes rival or exceed residential placement costs.
Most importantly, to understand is that decisions about placements and services are made financially blind by a team, not the school committee or local officials, who are responsible for managing the budget. The school committee has no say in the specific services or placement, which are determined solely based on the student’s needs by the educational team. Once services and placement are determined, they must be funded, regardless of budget constraints.
Over recent years, the superintendent has proposed initiatives like an alternative high school and an autism public day program to reduce the number of students sent out of district.
While these programs are promising, they require significant upfront investments—millions of dollars for start-up costs and staffing—funds that the school committee has not been able to allocate without impacting existing services. This is because the millions of dollars needed are above and beyond what is already needed to fund current service levels. While the programs are being created, the district must continue to fund all special education services. The school committee can not take existing services away to fund a new program, and the school committee can not refuse to fund new services during start-up. Additionally, the school committee can not require that students currently in OOD placements try the new program. The school committee cannot change a student’s placement.
Creating these programs does not guarantee that students currently placed out-of-district will ever return, since placement decisions are based strictly on individual needs and parents have stay-put rights to the current placement. Moreover, in most cases, even if in-district services appear adequate on paper, the team may determine that a student cannot receive FAPE within the district and must attend a private school. A student’s service delivery grid often does not explain why a student can not be educated in the district, since the district has all of the services on the IEP, but rather it is the totality of the program that is required to provide FAPE to the student.
The bottom line is that the high cost of special education stems from unfunded federal mandates, individualized services, a broken state funding formula, and the necessity of out-of-district placements when districts cannot meet student needs internally. While districts strive to develop in-house programs to manage expenses, the individualized and legally mandated nature of special education makes cost containment challenging.
As we look toward the future, understanding these complexities is essential for informed discussions about funding and resource allocation.