Seattle Times Helps Lead the Push for Better Special Education Spending
The Times is helping the cause of more funding for Special Education in this legislative session.
Chris Reykdal, state superintendent of public instruction, in consultation with Rep. Gerry Pollet, is requesting $972 million to close the gap over the next biennium and asking that the Legislature nix its old 13.5% cutoff on the number of kids who can be identified for special education. Washington is an outlier in this area, one of only five states that uses an enrollment-based flat cap to limit special education spending.
The Governor is not on-board, per his State of the State speech:
Inslee devoted 15 seconds to special education, suggesting that the Legislature bump up its cap to 15% of a district’s enrollment and add $120 million to the budget for very young special-needs kids.
At one level, dickering over percentages is beside the point. “They’re treating it like a math problem,” said Sarah Butcher, co-founder of the education advocacy group SEL for Washington. “It’s not a math problem. It’s a system-design issue.”
Reykdal’s proposal might be described as the Cadillac version of special ed funding, and Inslee’s the Hyundai model. Between these two poles, there are at least four other bills vying to tackle the problem this legislative session. That’s more attention than special-needs kids have seen in a long time, and it’s overdue. Parents report that, in an effort to keep costs down, schools have delayed identifying children for services — in some case for years.
After much foot-dragging, the Legislature finally began to address the real price of basic education after the courts forced it to fund the McCleary settlement in 2018. It shouldn’t take another lawsuit to get real about special-needs kids, too.
Comments
SpEd is a huge drag on SPSs budget. These are legally mandatory costs not funded by the state, and it seems the proportion of SpEd students just gets bigger as capable families bail for private school. Giving raises while heading towards a fiscal cliff was irresponsible, but a prolonged teacher strike would have also been painful… If Olympia can fix the SpEd issue, which is legitimate, we might be able to keep the school doors open.
Real Thing
Seattle Public Schools is spending over $1M per week to transport approximately 20% of the district's population. It is past time for transportation reform and time to call for fiscal responsibility and transportation reform to put dollars back into the classroom.
Seattle Public Schools is a horribly managed district.
Theo M
Banana Republic
Multiple things can be true at once. Throwing hands up and saying “bad management!” doesnt absolve the fact that 50k kids rely on SPS, and will be in a world of hurt if the district defaults. Transportation may be on SPS to fix but Sped underfunding is squarely on the shoulders of the state. More solutioning, less district dragging…we all know that goes nowhere.
Real Thing
-Theo M.
The biggest number of users of the yellow bus, elementary kids, are too young to be put on metro.
Please
Very old teacher here, so "the kids rely on us/you therefore allow this nonsense to proceed" doesn't work on me. That's the human shield that incompetent school and district administrations hide behind.
But I'm more interested in how Olympia is now coming through to bail out the malfeasance of SEA. We teachers did not need to strike; it was a way to show everyone their force and stay relevant, which unions are always desperate to do.
And then when you consider that teachers' unions are generally the number one donor to Democratic parties across American, and especially here in Democrat Washington, you see the cronyism between the unions and the Democrats. Don't even get me started on the party registrations of teachers...
It benefits us privileged white technocrats here in the I-5 corridor, so we don't remark on it much. But teachers' union dollars are integral to Democrat hegemony here.
Reykdahl and Inslee know which side their bread is buttered on.
Banana Republic
Yeah we all get the evils of “the system.” What are we going to do about schools is the question. Letting it fail lacks all kinds of creativity; that’s already going around other American institutions, police departments, hospital systems, childcare etc.
Real Thing
Ed
I'm confused by your false dichotomy. Why is not giving SPS more money to subsidize its mismanagement and unwillingness to stand up to SEA letting it fail?
I agree with Ed: a lot of special Ed can be done cheaper.
For example, dual-cert high school inclusion classes today have 2.0 FTE pet period in classes of 25-30 kids that are taught like regular classes. The sped cert is often doing IEPs in the back.
Use money better. That's creative. Slime more money out of Olympia. That's business as usual.
Banana Republic
Ed
"Very old teacher here, so "the kids rely on us/you therefore allow this nonsense to proceed" doesn't work on me. That's the human shield that incompetent school and district administrations hide behind."
I agree
Certainly you are very confused by the term “cap”. The “cap” in question is the hard limit on the amount of money to be paid by the state to the district for special education. That’s it: Money. Lifting that cap on spending is the only proposal the Times and/or various legislators are talking about. That “cap”, Eg the state spending limit, is the excess funding formula, legislatively defined, applied to exactly 13.5% of the student population. And that “excess funding formula” means the district will receive an extra $5,000 for each identified student with an iep, in addition to their $5,000 in basic education allowance… up to the cap. (Amounts are rounded).
Nobody anywhere has proposed to “uncap a custom curricula”. What custom curricula? That is meaningless. Custom curricula are already perfectly allowable by law and are not in question. And besides, everybody also knows there’s no curricula in special education anyway. There is also absolutely no “cap” on the number of students allowed to “be in special education.” The district is already free to identify every student in Seattle for special education if it believes they’re all disabled. It can identify until the cows come home…. but the state will not provide extra funds for that.
Perhaps you’re just incredibly inarticulate, and wish everyone had an IEP. Lucky for you that is already permissible. Just advocate for that. It’s already legal, and doesn’t require any changes to special education or it’s funding cap.
Ed