Several changes could be in the works for how special education programs at Louisiana’s K-12 public schools are monitored. They include a deadline to install video cameras in classrooms that the state funded two years ago.

The Senate Committee on Education gave unanimous approval Wednesday to , authored by Rep. Tony Bacala, R-Prairieville. It needs only full Senate approval before the heading to Gov. Jeff Landry.

The legislation calls for schools to install cameras in classrooms with special education students within 90 days of a parent’s request. The framework for installing the cameras was approved in 2021, and state money for the equipment was provided in 2022. However, many parents still complain that and schools are ignoring the requests.

“So, the cameras, we have tried to address this for a long time,” Sen. Beth Mizell, R-Franklinton, said Wednesday at a Senate Committee on Education meeting. “I’ve seen the calls from parents who cannot get the cameras, even though we funded it, even though we have said it is an urgent need in those classrooms… I’d love to know the level of compliance with the requests that have been made.”

To address compliance concerns, Bacala’s bill requires each school district and charter school operator to submit a report to its local special education advisory committee. The reports must include, at minimum: any compliance violations for failing to meet special education requirements; details on federal, state and local funding; and academic performance details for special education students .

The bill also calls for local school board members to undergo training on special education policy in addition to the subjects they already have to cover, such as literacy and numeracy, dropout prevention, early childhood education, school discipline and bullying.

The legislation also addresses dispute resolutions for parents, who would get up to two years to request a hearing once they become aware of an alleged action. The two-year timeline does not apply if local school officials misinform parents or withhold information on a violation of special education policy.

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is also directed to write rules for a early resolution process for settle “nonadversarial” disputes with local school systems.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on and .

Recommended but not mandatory at first, the professional development will be created and provided by people with disabilities. Backers believe the law will be the first in the country to empower people who experience ableism to educate teachers about it.

was the brainchild of a group of people with disabilities, along with parents and advocates. After comparing experiences, they realized how often they encountered ableism in schools — even in classrooms supposedly designed for them. An organization founded by parents — many of them immigrants — called the Multicultural Autism Action Network spearheaded the effort to add disability awareness to teachers’ continuing education. The proposal is poised to be among the final measures passed into law before the legislature adjourns May 20. 

A key lobbyist in the effort is Jillian Nelson, community resource and policy advocate at the Autism Society of Minnesota. Recently, she talked to The 74’s Beth Hawkins about the bill, being diagnosed with autism, her own experiences with ableism in school and the job she says was created just for her. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Not too long ago, the very idea of an autistic lobbyist was hard to fathom. How did you end up breaking that barrier?

I have really struggled getting by in life as an autistic person. I had a hard time in employment before I landed here, struggling with different things like relationships and getting the accommodations necessary throughout school and college. The Autism Society of Minnesota has given me the backing to do work I only ever dreamed of. Our amazing leadership team saw my strengths and created a role where I could utilize those in the best way for our community.

I run our information resource hotline. When people are going through challenges or newly diagnosed, I provide insight and help them navigate a world that’s fairly complex. I also do all our resource fair outreach work, which means I get to go out and connect with people.

And then all those conversations, I put them in my pocket and I head up to Capitol Hill, where I work with other organizations to advance disability law and create a great and equitable place here in Minnesota for people with disabilities to not just live and survive, but to thrive and have the same opportunities as everyone else. 

It also really matters to be working in a place where every single person around me is either autistic or understands autism. I can show up to work as myself without having to mask or play games that I don’t understand. 

Can you explain the term “mask”?

Masking is an emotionally exhausting process of pretending or portraying yourself as neurotypical or just like everyone else. People who mask go to great lengths to appear to have no disability or struggle and to just fit in. But when things don’t come naturally — like following every single social cue — it’s incredibly tedious to pick and choose what to say and do at every step of the way. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t. 

This year, you and your colleagues seem to have gotten a lot right. In less than two months you shepherded a bill addressing issues many people aren’t even aware of through a complicated legislative process where good ideas often go to die. 

This was born out of an opportunity a couple of years ago to bring together people with different types of disabilities to talk to the Minnesota Department of Education about their experience as special education students. One of the topics that came up was ableism and the not-so-great experiences they had surrounding that. 

The response this group received was so warm! But also, it was devastating that so many teachers came up afterward and said, “No one’s ever talked to us about ableism. No one’s ever given us this information. I wish I had known so I could have done better.” 

Children with disabilities, we’re turning them over to a system that doesn’t often recognize their existence as part of a broader culture. There might be bullying or assumptions that a student can’t do something. That presumed incompetence — we don’t give students with disabilities a chance to fail. We keep them in this bubble because we think they can’t succeed because of their disability. 

We want the youngest members of our culture to grow up with less trauma, with this sense of belief that they can do things that people in the past may have told them they weren’t capable of because of their disability. 

I think it’s going to surprise people that educators — especially special educators — aren’t routinely exposed to this information. 

One of the big disconnects is that disability in our education system is seen as a medical condition or a qualifying condition. When we teach about disability, we teach out of medical criteria. A lot of teachers are very familiar with the criteria for different disabilities. They know the laws they’re required to follow in special education. But everything is taught in theories: Here’s a special education learning theory about social-emotional learning, about social skills learning. We teach a lot on how to teach but not how to understand. 

The disability culture is the only group where we currently allow teachers to teach in a classroom that is filled entirely with children from this culture and have absolutely no cultural competency training or requirements. That’s what the ableism and disability justice bill is really about. It’s about creating cultural competency among teachers who are working with children from this really unique and beautiful culture. 

Disability as a culture is a relatively new concept. You have described deaf culture as a model: In 1988, students at Gallaudet University staged what’s known as the Deaf President Now protest, demanding that the school’s next leader be deaf. It seems ridiculous today that a hearing person would be seen as more capable of leading such an institution than any of the people it serves. Yet it was an “aha” moment when teachers heard from former special education students. 

It’s been a slow shift. As our society has shifted toward inclusion, and with the development of social media and technology, people with disabilities from all over the world have been able to connect and identify with one another. We realized that experiences we were having, the things that felt so isolating or challenging in our lives, that we weren’t alone in those experiences.

We stopped being individuals that this was happening to. We started to be a culture of individuals with shared experiences. People with disabilities started asking for what they needed to live full and impactful lives. 

It’s a tall order to help someone whose professional identity is tied up in seeing themselves as a student’s best advocate to see that they’re engaging in ableism. 

In high school, I wasn’t diagnosed with autism. I was a special education student, but for emotional behavioral disorder. My special education transition plan was that I would get a job in customer service or food service, because that’s what they believed I was capable of. Despite the fact that even my special education testing showed I was in the 99th percentile IQ-wise.

I graduated without ever taking the SATs or applying to a single college because the people that were in charge of helping me plan my future as a young person with disabilities never saw that as a possibility. That idea that they knew best and they were protecting me from potential failure was the thing that led to my biggest downfall. By the time I was 20 years old, I was a homeless drug addict. I didn’t see any path for my future or have a whole lot of hope. 

After I got diagnosed, I had a case manager who forced me to go to college. It changed everything. Finally, someone believed in me. She was willing to put me in a position to succeed — while knowing that there was a risk of failure. Instead of saying, “You can’t do this because of your disability,” she asked me, “How can we do this with your disabilities?”

I don’t believe that our education system, our teachers, set out to set students with disabilities up for failure or limit us to a small window of potential. But we don’t know what we don’t know, and when we know better, we do better. That’s really the core. We’ve never given teachers this information or an understanding of this unique and amazing culture. If we can do that, we can inspire them not to try to save us from ourselves, but to help us be the best version of ourselves.

What hurdles to the bill’s introduction did you anticipate? And what did you actually find? 

I anticipated what we did actually find: teaching lawmakers what ableism is and convincing them why it matters. There were some that jumped right on board. Our chief author in the House of Representatives, Rep. Kim Hicks, has been an amazing champion. She herself is a legislator with a disability and she has children with a disability. 

On the Senate side, though, we faced a number of hurdles. We went to Sen. Mary Kunesh looking for some suggestions, not necessarily expecting her to take it on. I started telling her my story and how ableism had held me back for so many years, and how I often wonder what I would have achieved if they had believed in me in high school. 

She asked me where I went to school. It was the school district where she taught. She looked at us and said, “Do you have the jacket with you? I’ll introduce the bill.” When you realize that this isn’t just happening somewhere else, it’s happening at the place that you teach, that hits home. 

We had to make it very real for people. Not just a theory or an idea, but these are the experiences happening to children now. This is something that has been a generational problem for decades. 

If you received special education services for the wrong diagnosis, you probably experienced a particularly pernicious form of ableism. I’m guessing your behavior, whatever it was, should have been a red flag for a sensory issue. 

Social anxiety, 100%. I went to school, but I didn’t go to most of my classes for my freshman and sophomore years because I was so socially anxious. But I wasn’t the kid smoking behind the dumpster. I was hanging out in the library researching my special interest [an autism culture term for a topic a person enjoys learning about in great depth], or hiding in the art room working on extra credit projects.  

My experience and the services and support I received were a gigantic red flag of ableism. They assumed the things that were holding me back were a choice, versus something I had no control over. I didn’t end up in special education until my sophomore year of high school — well after Asperger’s syndrome was in the DSM (the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). But we weren’t looking at individuals like myself and saying, “This might be autism.” We just assumed that the problem was not that I couldn’t do the things that they were asking me to, it was that I didn’t want to.

I have come to terms with being a later-diagnosed person with autism. But I think about how many things I missed out on. I graduated with a seventh-grade math level. I did special education civic engagement because they didn’t think I could handle the mainstream classroom with my classmates. Funny that I grew up to be a lobbyist. 

I wonder a lot, though, who I could have been if they figured out how to support me to my full potential, rather than to just manage what they thought of as behaviors. I wonder about all the opportunities that were taken from me because I just became a statistic. I think about a lot of the trauma that I endured as a teenager, being educated in classrooms with individuals that had very unmanaged, far more aggressive behaviors than me. 

So the hope is somebody who takes the training would look at a student who hid in the library and see massive evidence of engagement, and wonder, “Why is the student engaging there, instead of the social studies classroom?” 

I had teachers later on that did see that, and that’s where I got to thrive. When I was a senior retaking my sophomore English class — because I missed it, you know — my teacher asked me, “Why are you in my class?” I’m like, “Well, I’m here because the state of Minnesota says I need to be here.”

He turned my sophomore English credit into an independent study. The one assignment I had was to write a college-level paper. He said, “I’m not going to teach you how. If you need help, you’re going to have to ask.” He saw my talents, and he also saw what I actually needed to learn in that class: how to ask for help, how to work independently, how to plan my time. It prepared me for college more than writing a 10th-grade research paper ever would. 

I don’t want those teachers to be needles in a haystack, where there’s one or two. I want every teacher to look at a kid with disabilities with curiosity and ask, “How can we help them succeed?”

How do you introduce people to the idea that there’s joy and pride in a disabled person’s identity — things you would never want to change about yourself? 

One of the biggest things that I hope teachers take away from training about ableism is that we’re okay just the way we are. Feeling shame about disabilities? That’s not ingrained in us from birth. That’s something that we learn from the interactions we have with the world around us. I hope that as teachers embrace anti-ableism, instead of seeing us as a collection of deficits that need to be measured and tracked, they see the beautiful parts of our existence.

One of my greatest gratitudes about being autistic is the level of joy I get to experience in my special interest, in sensory things, in being able to see the world in such a beautiful, unique way that not everyone does. I hope that through this training, we can teach teachers to see that in their students, and we give students the opportunities to grow and learn to love themselves and find things to be proud of about their disabilities, versus just trying to make them conform to the expectations of a non-disabled society.

I got lucky when I landed at the Autism Society. But at the end of the day, I also recognize that all the things that make me so good at my job are because I’m autistic. I want future generations of kiddos with disabilities to grow up finding that pride and that joy in who they are.

The Virginia Board of Education on Thursday adopted changes to how the state handles compliance complaints regarding students with disabilities.

Since 2019, Virginia has been under ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Education, which previously determined that the state repeatedly failed to resolve complaints filed by parents and did not have “reasonably designed” procedures and practices to ensure a timely resolution process for those complaints.

The regulatory changes, which would align Virginia with federal regulations, replace standards that had not been updated since July 29, 2015.

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“We’re all committed to ensuring that our special education populations, their families, and students are receiving everything and more that they need to be successful,” said board president Grace Creasey at the board’s meeting on Thursday.

On March 13, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs provided the Virginia Department of Education with a report identifying areas where the commonwealth’s regulations were noncompliant with the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

During its investigation, the office found the state did not meet federal requirements to identify and correct noncompliance issues and confidentiality requirements.

Virginia is required by federal law to provide all students with disabilities a “free and appropriate public education” through personalized plans under the Individualized Education Program.

Nearly currently receive this service, nearly 7,000 more students than did a year ago.

As part of a legislative and budget package, Gov. Glenn Youngkin is considering measures that would create immense changes to improve how the state provides special education services.

According to the special education legislation that passed the General Assembly, the legislation calls for the state to create a system to oversee the development and use of IEPs for students with special needs. It would also require more training for educators on how to provide inclusive special education instruction.

The governor is also considering a total of $4.4 million over the next two years to establish eight regional special education family support centers, to provide professional development opportunities to school staff, and to enable ongoing special education coaching at schools.

Regulatory changes

Some of the consist of replacing words such as “local educational” agency with “public” agency and amending definitions of “business day,” “calendar day,” and “complaint” to align with federal regulations and OSEP guidance.

Other changes will require the Virginia Department of Education to determine on a case-by-case basis what information must be withheld when resolving a complaint filed by someone other than the child’s parent if the parent has not consented to the release of the child’s personally identifiable information.

Under the previous regulations, Virginia’s law did not allow for a case-by-case determination as to whether non-personally identifiable information can be shared with a non-parent complainant, and was inconsistent with federal regulations.

The board also agreed to amend the regulations to clarify that mediation is available “to parties to any dispute arising under the [Individuals with Disabilities Education] Act.”

In survey responses, parents of students with disabilities told researchers from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, the state’s legislative watchdog, that they were not being adequately informed of the state-level resources available to them for resolving disputes with their child’s school.

While the discussions in meditation processes are confidential and may not be used in court, the board removed the requirement for parties to sign a confidentiality form before any meditation begins.

Lisa Coons, superintendent of public instruction, said in her response to the federal office that a workgroup formed under the state agency developed the for Special Education, a plan informed by two outside experts’ evaluations and recommendations.

The plan outlines the creation of a team that reports directly to the state’s superintendent of public instruction, tasked with monitoring how school divisions provide special education services and assisting them as needed.

“We are committed to ensuring that all in Virginia receive high-quality instruction, with strong systems of parent and family engagement, prioritized monitoring and support, as well as an emphasis on post pathways for all learners,” Coons wrote in response to the federal office.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

OMAHA — Three Nebraska K-12 school districts are planting future teachers this spring in a new pilot program the Legislature seeded last year with $1 million.

North Platte Public Schools, Lincoln Public Schools and Westside Community Schools in Omaha are joining with higher education institutions and the state to ease the path from para-educator to teacher.

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Passing Legislative Bill 705 was one of several small steps the Legislature took in 2023 to give local school districts more tools to address an ongoing shortage of classroom teachers.

Once accepted, program participants — the classroom aides or educational assistants — can cut the cost and time it takes to complete a tailored teacher education program.

Credit for classroom work

The program’s higher ed partners at Chadron State College, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Midland University will grant college credits to paras for some of their classroom experience.

Organizers call it the “apprenticeship model.” Paras are paired with mentor teachers in their schools who serve as co-teachers and offer feedback to the paras and college faculty.

State Education Commissioner Brian Maher announced Westside as the state’s third pilot district Wednesday at Westbrook Elementary School, where ed assistant Shelly Sip helps kindergartners with reading.

Sip said she participates in a district-funded precursor to the state program. That program pays for an undergraduate teaching program at Midland at night while she works full-time during the day.

The 15-year ed assistant said she and many other para-educators want to be teachers but could not afford to attend a teacher education program without financial help from the district or the state.

“I wanted to be in the front of the room,” she said. “I wanted to make the lesson plans. And I found out that Westside is doing the program … and the district will pay for my education.”

She said she has benefited from seeing classrooms in her role as an education assistant. She helps lead reading groups, helps with math and walks kids to recess and lunch.

She said she attended the district, sent her kids to the district and now wants to teach there.

“I’m here, and I’ve been here since kindergarten, and I will be here for probably ever,” she said.

Another tool for school hiring

Andrea Haynes, Westside’s assistant superintendent for human resources, said the new program would reduce the time that paras spend outside of the classroom preparing to become teachers.

She called the program a “groundbreaking partnership” that shows the district and the state’s commitment to “nurturing talent and fostering a strong educational community.”

She said it helps address the teacher shortage by “building a sustainable pipeline of amazing educators right from our own classrooms.”

“We believe this innovative model not only accelerates their path to becoming certified teachers, but it also empowers them to elevate their impact,” Haynes said.

Mary Ritzdorf, dean of the Walker School of Education at Midland, said the university and Westside were still working out specifics of how many credits paras could earn while at work.

Traditional students in teaching programs don’t get into classroom settings regularly until their final year of college. In this, officials said, paras have an edge.

The apprenticeship model would likely, among other things, help accepted paras to stay working in their schools through their student teaching, reducing the need for substitutes.

More certified teachers needed

Nancy Christensen, the associate professor of education who runs Midland’s teaching programs for ed assistants and paras, said the goal is getting more qualified teachers certified.

The Westside district alone has 200 or so ed assistants, Haynes said, including many serving as helpers for special education teachers, general ed teachers and as hall monitors.

Using existing para-to-teacher programs, Westside expects to graduate about seven to eight paras this spring and 10-15 a year, she said. Each agrees to work five years in exchange for the aid. The length-of-service commitments vary from district to district.

Districts statewide are exploring higher pay, bonuses and benefits to lure new teachers and retain those they already employ, officials said Wednesday.

Maher said he understands they are “robbing Peter to pay Paul” by finding new teachers among the ranks of also difficult-to-hire paras.

“We need to fill both buckets, quite frankly,” he said.

LB 705 set aside $1 million a year for the program from the Education Future Fund. When asked whether he thought the Legislature might find more funding if the pilot program was successful, Maher said it appears more likely that school districts would fund such programs if they help find and hire teachers.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on and .

Since the start of the pandemic, the number of students with disabilities who are chronically absent from Minneapolis Public Schools has doubled or nearly doubled in more than a third of schools. More than 1,600 do not attend classes on a regular basis.

In four schools, the number has tripled, and in two there has been more than a four-fold increase. Attendance has improved in just six of the 55 traditional schools for which the district recently released five years of school-level attendance data. 

The district did not post data regarding 14 specialized schools that serve students with profound needs, including self-contained special education programs. At some of those programs, attendance is not reported at all. According to separate state data, less than 4% of students enrolled in Minneapolis’s high school for students with the most intensive behavioral issues attend on a regular basis.

The numbers illuminate a largely unexamined facet of a national crisis coming out of the pandemic’s school disruptions. Historically, students with disabilities are the demographic group most likely to suffer from high rates of absenteeism. And they are so vulnerable to the resulting harms that federal civil rights laws require educators to take special care to make sure they get to school — and that they get help catching up once they are there. 

Indeed, within weeks of the first COVID school closures in 2020, the U.S. Department of Education warned that shifts to remote learning did not absolve education leaders of their responsibilities to this population. Minnesota was quick to requiring school systems to identify special education students who needed extra help making up academic and developmental losses, and offering to help defray the cost. It’s unclear how many received these recovery services. 

Overall, according to by the Minneapolis district, the number of students with disabilities who are chronically absent rose from 29% in the academic year that ended in 2019 to a peak of 53% in 2022 and then 46% in 2023. However, those averages conceal huge variations among individual schools, ranging from 21% to 80% in 2023.

The state and the district use different calculations to determine whether a student is chronically absent. Under the state’s definition — students who miss 10% or more of school days for which they were enrolled  — Minneapolis’s 2022 special education absenteeism rate was 61%, versus 39% statewide. The district counts only students who are enrolled for 95 or more days.

Students who qualify as chronically absent under the state rule have missed more than three weeks of the school year. 

Absenteeism is a predictor of poor student outcomes as early as kindergarten. Elementary pupils who are chronically absent risk not being able to read by third grade. Students who reach that watershed mark illiterate are four times more likely to drop out of high school. Students who miss 10% or more of any year between eighth and 12^th grades are seven times more likely to drop out. 

In 2023, some 5,000 district students received special education services, state statistics show, and in 2022, just 37% of them attended school consistently. Of those, 16% and 19%, respectively, met grade-level standards for math and reading. In 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, about half graduated. In 2021, 87 went on to post-secondary education. One-fourth of those who did earned a year’s college credits within two years. 

Minneapolis officials declined The 74’s request for an interview for this story or for comment on our data analysis. In a statement, special education officials said attendance is a topic of quarterly discussions district leaders have with school administrators about student learning outcomes in general. They also suggested that families are keeping children with disabilities home over health concerns.  

The Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, the law that guarantees disabled children’s rights, requires districts to identify children who need supports — a mandate that extends to tracking down missing pupils and investigating whether their disability factors into why they are not in school. If it does — common reasons include an environment that is hostile or overwhelms a child with sensory issues — the school must make appropriate accommodations. 

In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand an appeals court decision finding that a school system adjacent to Minneapolis violated the rights of a student who, year after year, was absent for weeks. The district should have , the court ruled. Instead, she was repeatedly disenrolled.

Often, the students school leaders don’t go in search of are disengaged because they are not getting the help they need to succeed, says Andrea Jepsen, a Twin Cities special education attorney who was one of the lawyers who brought the case.

“Districts love to make much of the absences of a child on an [Individualized Education Program] because they think it gets them off the hook to show progress,” she says. “But generally, the kid is not absent enough to justify the abject failure to produce meaningful progress on ambitious goals and objectives in the kids that I see. 

“And again, those absences should prompt further inquiry, not total resignation.”

Indeed, that while children with disabilities quickly lose academic ground when classes are interrupted, they also are more likely than other students to post strong growth during the school year. 

Minneapolis has struggled to provide basic services to students with disabilities. The district has had a number of unstaffed special education classrooms over the last four years.  

In 2022, the district abruptly canceled in-person summer learning for hundreds of children who had been promised help bouncing back. Officials cited staffing problems, something disability advocates were quick to point out is neither a justification allowed by law nor an issue that plagued summer programming for general education students. Neighboring districts had no similar staffing problems.

The number of unfilled special education teacher and paraprofessional jobs increased in Minneapolis between fall 2022 and the start of the current school year, with vacancies concentrated in the highest-poverty schools. The exact extent of the staffing shortage has been the subject of a tussle between school board members who have repeatedly asked for data and administrators who depict hiring as ongoing. 

The local news site Minneapolis Schools Voices both years, finding 46 vacant special educator positions at the start of the 2022-23 academic year and 58 this year, as well as more than 100 unfilled classroom aide jobs. 

One reason for the increase: In early 2023, district leaders announced the creation of 400 academic intervention positions to help struggling students recover from pandemic setbacks. Some of the new jobs were filled by special educators. At least 14 teachers who had taken interventionist jobs were asked to return to the classroom, according to presentations to the board. 

In November, district leaders that three schools had no intervention staff. Special education chronic absenteeism at those schools ranges from 59% to 70%.

Parents of students receiving disability services at the city’s highest-poverty schools say that six months into the school year there are still special education classrooms without a dedicated teacher. Because some of the same schools — which tend to enroll students with disabilities at much higher rates — lack the new intervention staff, advocates fear that many of the educators needed to support disabled children have ended up at wealthier and better-staffed schools enrolling fewer, lower-needs special education students. 

has found that students with disabilities are 1.5 to 2 times more likely to be chronically absent than their general education classmates, for reasons ranging from chronic health problems to anxiety caused by bullying and harassment, trauma and housing insecurity. 

A 2017 study found that students with emotional disturbances were more than 13 percentage points more likely to be chronically absent than general education pupils in the same classrooms. Children with learning disabilities were 8 percentage points more likely to be missing than their classmates. 

The same research found that it mattered whether a disabled student was assigned to a regular classroom or one populated mostly with special education students. Students in segregated settings were 17 points more likely to be absent, and 24 points more likely if they are in a self-contained classroom and have an emotional disturbance. Children served mostly in general education settings were only 5 points more likely to be chronically absent. 

A professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, Michael Gottfried is one of the authors of the 2017 paper. To him, the findings reveal a cycle of disengagement. 

“What we think is actually happening is school belonging,” he says. “In inclusive, traditional rooms, [students] feel connected to the adults. And they don’t feel that way when they’re in segregated rooms.” 

It’s likely that absenteeism among students served in the most restrictive settings has an impact on educator engagement, too, he adds, feeding a vicious cycle. 

IDEA, the law that holds schools responsible for students with disabilities, says they must be educated in the “least restrictive setting” — alongside their non-disabled peers as often as possible. That means it’s incumbent on schools to ensure the environment is hospitable to all children, including those with sensory challenges, anxiety and other traits that can make remaining in class traumatic enough that a student refuses to go to school, says Maren Christenson, executive director of Minneapolis’s Multicultural Autism Action Network. 

“There’s a difference between mainstreaming and inclusion,” she says. “This is about creating environments where all students can succeed. Sometimes that means asking, ‘How crowded are the hallways? Does the bell system make you want to jump out of your skin?’ ”

To this, add the months of pandemic-driven turmoil during which many children with disabilities were left without workable remote instruction, says Gottfried: “Expectations are broken and family trust is broken. The message keeps changing. That creates anxiety about school. There’s probably a sense of disappointment that services used to be offered for [a] child and now they’re not.”

Minnesota schools receive state funding according to how many students show up each day. Because of this, the attendance policy school leaders are most accustomed to worrying about is a law requiring them to disenroll any student who is absent for 15 or more consecutive days. Tracking how many children miss 17 or more days a year is a newer requirement — and one that in many places is the responsibility of district leaders, not educators or principals. 

State lawmakers are considering that would require schools to report much more detailed information on chronically absent students, including how many miss more than 10%, 30% and 50% of the year, and to calculate the numbers for each demographic group. 

“Even a return to pre-pandemic numbers isn’t good enough,” says Matt Shaver, policy director of EdAllies, which is lobbying for the new reporting requirements. “The deleterious effects of missing that much school — they compound. You can look at those numbers and predict who’s probably not going to graduate from high school.”

Correction: Andrea Jepsen is a Twin Cities special education attorney. An earlier version of this story misspelled her last name.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provided funding for the research referenced by University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education Professor Michael Gottfried and  financial support to The 74.

Michael and Diane sit down with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist, researcher, professor and author focused on intelligence, creativity and human potential. They discuss the importance of placing all students — not just those that are in gifted or special education programs — at the center of their learning. They also apply nuance to popular concepts in education psychology, consider how intelligence became taboo, and illustrate the importance of seeing the middle way and other sides of the issues. 

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane.

Diane Tavenner: I missed you a lot last episode. It’s good to have you back, and I appreciate that you continue to carry and balance a lot, so it’s good to be here with you.

Michael Horn: Yeah, it’s good to be back in conversation with you. I was really sad to miss the last conversation for multiple reasons, but this conversation was one I was really excited to be in, and so I did not want to miss it. And it’s also good to be back in a routine, because routines are important, but this conversation in particular, I think, is going to be really stimulating.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, routines are so important. One of the many things I learned from my undergraduate degree in psychology, which is in many ways the foundation for how I think about learning and teaching and education. And so today, I am equally excited for the conversation we’re going to have with one of my favorite psychologists in the world, Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman. In addition to authoring nearly a dozen books and writing a really insightful and useful newsletter that I would recommend to everyone, he hosts the most popular psychology podcast called the Psychology Podcast, and he’s the founder of the Center for Human Potential, which says a lot about who he is and what he believes in. And they offer courses and opportunities to learn self-actualization coaching, which is something I’m sure we’ll get into in a few minutes, what that means and why it’s important. I could go on and on about Scott’s resume, but I want to actually get in and talk with him. So let me just say, what’s important for me, beyond all of that, is just his care and focus on doing work that actually impacts people’s lives and is meaningful and relevant, and in particular in schools and with young people. And so that is where we connected over a decade ago, I think, or somewhere around there.

Diane Tavenner: And his work has deeply influenced me and my work. So super grateful to have him here. And I know, Michael, you feel equally strong.

Michael Horn: Yeah. Well, Scott, I won’t keep singing your praises too long, but I want to do a little bit more adulation, because among all the things that Diane just mentioned, I also appreciate how, in social media, you are able to strike a nuanced balance in a medium that does not appreciate nuance, and yet you’re able to be popular still. And that’s something we care about deeply in this conversation. Like Diane and I are always trying to find the nuance. We’re always trying to find third ways between polarized viewpoints. And I know we’re going to tackle some big topics today in not nearly the time that they deserve, from self-actualization to growth mindset to intelligence. But I just always appreciate how you tackle these topics, and you move beyond the average into the nuance so seamlessly. So, Scott, I will stop being a total fanboy, but just really excited to see you guys.

Scott Barry Kaufman: It is such an honor to be here. I love you guys, and I feel like I need to invite you two on my podcast someday.

Diane Tavenner: Well, we’re happy to do that. And so let’s open the conversation with something that I love, which is, you wrote a manifesto. I think a lot of people think about writing a manifesto, but you actually wrote one. This isn’t just any manifesto. It’s a manifesto on human-centered education.

Scott Barry Kaufman: Yeah.

Diane Tavenner: And so let’s just start there. Tell us about your beliefs, which I think really go to the core of what is the purpose of education, which is something Michael and I talk about all the time.

Scott Barry Kaufman: Yeah. Thank you so much for bringing that up. I think I’m unwaveringly humanistic in my, like, I really am unflappable about this. All around me, I’ll see non humanistic approaches, and I just try not to get caught up in the vortex of those tsunamis. I stay in my own path. I really believe firmly that all students should be treated as human first. And it’s a very simple principle that has very deep implications. Yet it is mind-bogglingly not the central principle of education. There’s such a focus on results first, or whatever it be now. It’s not SAT now because SAT has been banned everywhere. But they’re still thinking about, well, what other results should we look to? It’s still results focused in a sort of standardized way. They just move the goalpost from one standardized goalpost to another, to come up with a metaphor that doesn’t make any sense. But anyway, you knew what I meant. So I just think that that frustrates me, because I think there’s so much greater potential that students have. They can display to us if we treat them as a whole person and we view sort of a needs-based approach where we recognize that to be human comes with certain basic needs as well as growth needs. I don’t think either security needs or growth needs are being met in schools. And then it is a legitimate question, what should be in the purview of education. And I think that’s an interesting question, too, but I would argue the human part belongs, somewhat at least.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, I think Michael’s going to take us more in that direction in a moment. But before we go there, is it useful to just sort of define self-actualization. Like, what does that mean to you? And how should we…And I know you have a beautiful metaphor that you use, but I think that would be helpful to folks.

Scott Barry Kaufman: Oh, sure. Absolutely. So there are other buzzwords that are popular these days, like happiness and achievement are the two biggest ones I see over and over again in the education world. But I think self-actualization has a different flavor. It sort of vibrates on a different frequency than either happiness or achievement. It’s something else. It’s not a word that’s used much these days. It was used a lot in the pot-smoking sixties. And I’m trying to put it on a scientific foundation for anyone who will listen to me. I’m trying to put it on the science of self-actualization. And show that we can measure certain characteristics that bring us closer to realizing the best within us, sort of our highest potential, our unique creative potential. And that’s really all. I think of it as. What is your unique creative contribution or unique creative potential? It’s not as flowery and spiritual sounding as it sounds. That’s all I mean, and that is something different, though, than happiness and achievement. You can actually be realizing your unique creative potential. And have a lot of meaning in your life, but not particularly feel happy a lot. And we need to teach people that’s okay. You know, we have a lot of young people who are obsessed with just feeling good all the time and are colossal assholes to know.

Michael Horn: No, but it’s so interesting to hear you say that, Scott. And your writing on this has been so foundational to my thinking about it. And I’d love you to just translate that, because I think you gave a good overview of sort of what not to optimize for in education. And maybe started to hint at, you know, if we’re thinking about the unique contributions of each individual as a human being. So, what, in your mind, might that look like from the experiences? And we can stay broad strokes, but just thinking about young kids in elementary school through middle and high school, I imagine it changes over time. What are the sorts of experiences that you think school ought to have for students?

Scott Barry Kaufman: Yeah, great question. So I come at a lot of this through the pathway of trying to reconceptualize gifted education and special education. So let me just say my roots in this. My first book over a decade ago was called Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. Where I argued for reconceptualization of human intelligence. I called it the theory of personal intelligence. Now I’m calling it the theory of self-actualizing intelligence because that’s more in line with everything I’m doing right now. But that’s really what I was arguing for, was saying, like, look, we treat these gifted kids as though they’re the only ones capable or not they’re capable. They’re the only ones who would benefit from enrichment. It’s like, what? A lot of them aren’t even benefiting from whatever the “enrichment” they’re giving in gifted education classes, which is nothing very valuable to even the gifted kids. But I really think that there’s also this false dichotomy we have that you’re either learning disabled on one hand or gifted on the other hand, or you’re in this third category, mainstream education, where you’re just supposed to fly by the seat of your pants. That’s it. You got nothing special, you got no excuses. I think that’s just like, wow, what a weird system we have in K-12, where that’s the way the world looks. And I really believe, in terms of experiences, I think we can democratize a lot of the spirit of how we treat gifted kids, but democratize that towards everyone. But we view it through the lens not of achievement. We view gifted kids as though their goal is to then go out and create Facebook, like that’s their only purpose, or to get in Harvard and then pay back the endowment someday. But I feel like people are worth more than that as humans. And democratizing gifted education in a way where the lens of self-actualization for everyone, I think, just completely changes the goalpost, because every student viewed through the lens of self-actualization, you’d treat them the same way in terms of experiences. Maybe the experience would be different, but in terms of the sort of flavor of the experience is that we try to emphasize project-based learning. I mean, this is…Diane’s, no stranger to a lot of the experiences I’m going to mention right now, being a legend when it comes to creating just these kinds of experiences. I remember when Diane gave me a tutorial in the Facebook headquarters. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that. I don’t know if that was like a top-secret meeting, but you can edit that out if I wasn’t allowed to say that. But just individualizing things – in a way where this may sound a little “woo-woo” – but honoring the sacredness of each child’s unique self-actualization journey is something really special. And why do we only honor that if you’re, quote, gifted, and then we don’t even really honor that. What we do is we put so much pressure on you to perform and be gifted. “Oh, you’re gifted now be gifted.” And then a lot of these…Then there’s a whole field of gifted education on underachieving gifted students, which I think is a ridiculous term in itself. I’ve argued that we need to get rid of the word underachieving because then that implies that there are ungifted kids who are overachieving. And I’m like, what the hell does that mean? Biological opposites. There’s just so much. I don’t know. I feel like I’m a little quirky. I’m a little odd. I just see things differently. But this is just the way I see it. It’s ridiculous the kind of system we set up. And I do think we can create experiences that give a vitality or an aliveness not just to school but to life.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah. So much of what you’re saying, Scott. I think, I’m sure people who know what we talk about and are connecting that to the work that I do, they’ll see it in what you’re saying. We use some different words. We use personalization and things like that. But this idea that each individual human has their own, they’re a unique human that will develop into this world. And if we help them develop, they’re going to make a contribution. And none of us know what that is. And it will be very, if we do it well, it will be widely varied. Right. And that’s the beauty of the world and the human experience. Another thing that I incorporate a lot into my work – or have over the years – is this idea of growth mindset and this concept. And you’ve done some really fascinating interviews recently with Carol Dweck, and you’re doing some writing about this. And as Michael said, one of the things that often happens to practitioners is we hear these competing ideas from the science and then we don’t know what to make of it. And I don’t think that’s where you’re going here with growth mindset. You have some really interesting comments, but I don’t think you’re saying throw the baby out with the bathwater. Help us get the nuance of growth mindset that we should be understanding.

Scott Barry Kaufman: I think I can get right to the core of the nuance there with a quote from Maslow: “What’s not worth doing is not worth doing well.” And that just explains my whole critique of growth mindset theory. But still, of course, not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What tends to happen is that wonderful researchers – I consider them my friends, like Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck – they will do a lot of hard-earned research and will present a construct, but then educators will treat it like it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and will apply it indiscriminately to everything without any appreciation of context. I saw it happen not just with growth mindset, but I saw it happen with grit. It’s just like, “Oh my God, you have entire schools that are now around grit. Grit is the only thing that matters in the school.” And it’s like, why is grit the only thing that matters? I don’t think Angela would ever say that. Angela is a wonderfully nuanced human, and she would never argue that. It’s just ridiculous how much we can focus so much on. And so I think blind grit, as I’ve called it, or blind growth mindset…You can have growth mindset, mindset up the wazoo for things that aren’t right for you, and then why should we be rewarding that? You applied your growth mindset to that? I make the distinction between growth mindset and growth motivation. In my self-actualization program, we really focus on growth motivation. We really don’t talk about growth mindset at all because I think that can come from a growth motivation when you are intrinsically motivated to grow in a certain direction based on what is really right for you or right for your soul. Again, sorry, pardon me if I sound woo woo here, but I do think there is something. There’s a capital self soul, whatever the meditation people far before psychology ever existed, as a field pointed out, when you’re really, really in touch with that, you can’t help but have a growth mindset. That’s like an outcome of a growth motivation. But when you lead with growth mindset without the soul involved, I don’t think that’s anything to be applauded.

Michael Horn: Super interesting, Scott, because hearing you say that reminds me also of sort of the research around motivation more generally. It’s not just your belief in, “Can I accomplish the goal?” it’s the “Is it a goal worth accomplishing?” And to me, and not to some other person, but to me. And so it sounds like it comes from there. The other thing I’ve taken from some of your conversations, and I want to try this out on you and see if it makes sense, is in one of the conversations you had with Carol, she did and you did talk about how she could have like a low dosage intervention, a 45 minutes or a couple of times sort of tutorial, if you will, on growth mindset. And it could produce – I’m going to mess it up – but I think a 0.15 standard deviation of impact. And she’s like, this is a huge thing. But then I think your observation was that it could be undermined by other characteristics, like if the teacher didn’t really believe in growth…And I’ll try to use growth motivation for this conversation. Or something I think a lot about is that the system often undermines these views of growth. So in a time-based education system or a zero-sum education system, I can tell you all about growth mindset or growth motivation all I want. But at the end of the day, if at the end of a three-week unit, we all move on to the next one, regardless of the effort you’ve put in, regardless of learning, and I label you a C student, or something, I’ve just shot in the foot everything I was preaching in my 45-minute intervention. And so in some ways, the environment, I think, deeply undermines any of these things, intentionally or unintentionally. But maybe I’m misunderstanding you. I sort of wanted to paint that scenario and get you to react.

Scott Barry Kaufman: Context matters. And in the more recent updated papers that Carol has written, to be fair to Carol, she makes that very clear. I have a Substack newsletter and I did a really deep, deep reference list with a deep dive. Yeah, it’s really nerdy. I wanted to lay it all out there to show I don’t have an agenda. I think that’s something that’s a little bit quirky about me. Is that with any of this, I don’t have an agenda. I have beliefs based on evidence. But I can always be changed and my beliefs can change. Although I did, earlier, say “I firmly believe.” I do firmly believe things, but even those can be changed. But when you look at the full research literature in the past five years on growth mindset, everyone agrees: context matters. Everyone agrees. When we’re not talking about you’re trying to sell a best-selling book and the publicity machine isn’t behind it…The publicity machine doesn’t care at all about the truth. It cares about what it cares…It has its own goals. The publicity ecosystem has its own goals. But if your goal is truth, everyone agrees. If you read Carol’s response to the critics…I posted a paper that her David Yeager, I think that’s his name, David Yeager, who’s also a star superstar in this world. Really heartfelt. He has a really heartfelt love of this work. He does. And he really wants to help others. And I’ve talked to him. And so I can say that to be the case, he’s a big influencer.

Diane Tavenner: Of my work as well.

Scott Barry Kaufman: Amazing. Yeah. I have nothing but massive respect for all these people, but I am a nerd. At the end of the day, I really want to know the truth. I don’t like BS. I don’t like a lot of fat around things. I want to be like, no what is the data? And everyone agrees, when they wrote their response paper to the critics, they agreed. In the response paper, they said underserved populations tend to benefit more from growth mindset interventions than upper-class rich people. And you look at the little nuances, teacher effectiveness matters. Like, you can have a terrible teacher teaching growth mindset, and that’s not as effective an intervention than a good teacher. So you start adding in these really important nuances and it adds up to a much more nuanced picture.

Michael Horn: Let’s go to the other topic that you’ve spent a lot of time on researching: intelligence. You’ve done a lot of work on the construct of intelligence and general IQ and such. And at least in my experience, educators are often uncomfortable with the notion that a general IQ or something like that might exist. And of course, there’s lots of other works around intelligence. There’s Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences. There’s stuff on emotional intelligence, Peter Salovey, others. And some people will then throw arrows at those folks. I think for our audience, it would be useful for you to give a bit of a landscape around the research around intelligence and what are the implications for educators here.

Scott Barry Kaufman: I mean, how much time do you have?

Michael Horn: We’ll let you stretch out a little bit.

Scott Barry Kaufman: Yeah, I’m a little bit on the Asperger spectrum, so if you get me started on a passion topic, I can’t stop talking. So this is particularly…While everyone else was dating in grad school, I was in the library, literally going through every book in the intelligence book section. So I’m obsessed with that question you asked. Well, Robert Sternberg, for instance, he was my advisor in grad school.

Michael Horn : Oh, wow.

Scott Barry Kaufman: And I was accepted to work with Howard Gardner as well at Harvard. So I had to make that choice. Do I work with Robert Sternberg or Howard Gardner? No offense to Howard Gardner, I chose to be in a psychology department as opposed to a school of education. But they both influenced me greatly when I was an undergraduate and I was reading their works because I really felt like it rang true that there is something, there is more to intelligence than what’s measured on IQ tests. And that to me was a very important insight. They both differ in what that “more” is, but they both argue that IQ tests are missing out on a lot of what it is to be intelligent. I would argue that it misses out a lot of what it means to be human. And that’s a little bit of a different argument. That’s sort of the direction I’ve gone in that’s different than both of them just giving you a sort of context. And where do I sit in this whole thing? Yeah. So they really focus on extending the abilities, right? Both of them. It’s abilities they’re extending, but I’m trying to extend beyond ability to passion and to the domain of motivation. So that was my…I hope people view that as a contribution to the field of intelligence and the field of gifted education. I reported on a statistic over a decade ago that boggled my mind. [Out of] almost every gifted education program in the country, only one considers motivation an important part of the identification process for giftedness. And so that blew my mind because talent and motivation, to me, are inextricably intertwined. Ability and motivated, whatever you want to call it, talent, ability, intelligence, whatever the heck you want to call it, they are so inextricably intertwined. A lot of pop books like to say talent is overrated. You could sell a lot of copies of books [with that]. If you say talent is overrated, I think talent is underrated. And what I mean by that…Maybe I’ll write the book someday: Talent Is Underrated. I actually am thinking about that. It sounds cheeky. And someone might say, “Well, how, Scott? Wait. How could you say that? Aren’t you making the argument? What?” My argument is that, no, talent is really important, but in a different way than people think. I don’t believe that it should be threatening to others if someone has an innate talent. I think that we should have a school system where everyone’s unique talents and its linkages to their own motivations and goals are appreciated. And we’re not anywhere near that. We’re cutting SAT programs. We’re terrified of talent in the name of. “Don’t open up this can in the name of equity.” We’ve said excellence just doesn’t matter at all. I believe you can have equity and excellence. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a monster, but I’m just saying it’s like everyone’s one way or the other in their thinking these days, and we need more of a “both and” way of thinking. I think that excellence has fallen by the wayside in this. We’re terrified to admit that intelligence matters or that there are talents. I would rather broaden the notion of talent to include motivation but not get rid of or ignore talent as a concept that’s important or intelligence as a concept that’s important. There are obvious individual differences in various dimensions, and you can sweep them under the rug as much as you want to in the name of equity and say, like, “Oh, everyone is exactly the same. We’re communism.” But no matter how hard you try to do that, good luck. People’s soul is still going to yearn for expression no matter what you do.

Diane Tavenner: Something that’s coming up for me right now is, I know we’re getting to a place where we probably need to close, but, Scott, you’ve touched on it a bunch.

Scott Barry Kaufman: It got me started.

Diane Tavenner: It feels like it’s okay to share. One of the things that I think the two of us have connected on over the years is a sort of common experience as children in education. For me personally, I may have touched on this before, but I was tested for special education, and I was denied access to gifted programs, and that then put me in that middle mainstream that you’re talking about. Tons of context was missing. I was in a home that was physically and emotionally abusive, and there was all this stuff going on. And to your point, inside of me as a little girl, I knew that I was highly motivated. There’s things of me that needed to be expressed and come out and always felt like they were sort of hampered or blocked by the system. And I got lucky along the way that a few people believed in me in ways. And I know you have a very similar story that we have really resonated…that influences how we see education in the system and the purpose of it. And so I just feel like that’s coming out. We’re just scratching the surface of how it comes out in your work and your willingness to be nuanced and to not sort of just accept these big concepts and have a polarized conversation, but actually dig in on what the implications and what they mean at deeper levels.

Scott Barry Kaufman: Absolutely. I just tweeted something just a couple of minutes ago – not…minutes before our interview, that’d be awkward – [that] said, while extremists certainly think they are the most knowledgeable in the room, there’s a new massive worldwide study across 44 different nations that found that moderates are actually the most knowledgeable about politics. But I think that this applies to anything – educators as well. I think that the loudest voice in the room isn’t necessarily the most knowledgeable.

Diane Tavenner: So many things for us to take away. But I think the one that I really want to focus in on as we wrap is your willingness to have your mind changed. So to hold strong perceptions and opinions about what you’re doing today, but then being open to what the evidence is going to say and what more you can learn.

Scott Barry Kaufman: I’ll give you an example of that real quick. I went into the field thinking I was taking down IQ. Gardner, Stern[berg], that was my starting place. And carving my own unique space has been a journey because I started to do traditional IQ research with Nicholas McIntosh at University of Cambridge, published articles on IQ with IQ test constructors, like, sort of went to the dark side, of what I had originally viewed as the dark side, and realized that there is a lot of nuance to this stuff. The field of human intelligence is actually a really rich, interesting, exciting field. The genetics, the neuroscience, the interactions between genetics and the environment and even lead and how much that can affect environmental factors, epigenetic expressions. It’s such a rich, rich field. And then to just make some blanket statements like “IQ bad,” I don’t know. What will they say is good? IQ bad – what’s good? I don’t know. What’s the opposite of IQ? “Being dumb, good.” Let’s promote dumbness in society now. I think that there just is a lot of…But that’s one example, anyway, of how my mind changed over the years, because I did start off thinking in a simplistic way and my own approach. Now, I literally said, talent is underrated. I said that. Scott Barry Kaufman said that. I would never have said that when I started off in my career. There was a book, I think it was called Talent Is Overrated. Yeah, that’s actually the title of the book, and that was one of my bibles, along with Howard Gardner’s book and Sternberg’s book. And so that would have been my sort of proselytizing to everyone is that talent’s overrated. ”We need to ignore talent.” And my nuance is that I’m saying, “No, actually, I think we can hold in our mind multiple things at once that talent really exists.” I watched this five-year-old prodigy playing Rockmanoff on YouTube the other day. Well, you want to say, “Let’s cancel any program to help nurture that kid, because we’re all…With enough grit, with enough growth mindset…

Michael Horn: We can all do that.

Scott Barry Kaufman: We can all do that? Like, no, no, we can’t. Sorry.

Michael Horn: Wow.

Scott Barry Kaufman: Do you know what I’m saying?

Diane Tavenner: I totally know what you’re saying. And the only thing I would add on to it, and then I’ll turn it over to Michael to bring us home, is, I believe there’s something in every single human. There is talent in every single human, and that’s what we should be searching for and enabling to come out, because we just have such a limited view on what is valued and what talent is. And so the companion to that is the expansion of appreciation and definition of talent.

Scott Barry Kaufman: Well, that’s it. You nailed it. I think we’re all on the same page.

Michael Horn: I think that’s right. And I love taking that from this conversation. It’s more helping the individual express what’s meaningful to them and how they can make a contribution to the broader society. So, Scott, as we wrap up, Diane and I have little tradition where we give folks a little bit of a window into things we’re watching for pleasure or reading for pleasure, whatever. It might be, often not related to work. Sometimes it is related to work, because Diane and I are nerds, and I love that about you. It’s hard for us to strip that away. So, yeah, if we could put you on the spot, what’s something you’re writing or, excuse me, listening to? Watching? Reading?

Scott Barry Kaufman: Sure. So I’m absolutely obsessed right now with the field of mentalism, which is a subset of magic. And I practice now about 8 hours a day. And I created an Instagram. I’m the amazing Dr. Scott.

Michael Horn: Okay, we’ll follow.

Scott Barry Kaufman: A year or two from now, look out. I want to actually maybe move into doing some gigs and things. I’m going to set up a table on the beach path here in Santa Monica. I can read your mind. I think it’s a nice fusion of my psychology background. Anyway, that’s what I’m into. Yeah.

Michael Horn: Diane, what about you?

Diane Tavenner: Well, I’m going to change up today, because this conversation has brought back to me a short story that I’ve read many times that is just so related to what we’re talking about. It’s a Kurt Vonnegut short story called Harrison Bergeron. And if you haven’t read it, it just epitomizes what we’re talking about in this conversation. So highly recommend. Very provocative and interesting. How about you, Michael?

Michael Horn: Very cool. Well, I confess I’ve been in such a state of mind with my family. Scott, my father-in-law passed away, so he was mildly on the Asperger’s spectrum as well, and had all these handwriting patents and recognition. He would read people’s personalities through their handwriting. Really fun stuff.

Scott Barry Kaufman: I love this guy.

Michael Horn: Amazing individual helped build the initial Thinkpad by IBM. But as a result, though, I’ve been unable to read or watch much the last few weeks. And so I’ve been going deep on just Australian Open tennis because that’s my happy place. And as a result, the Two-Minute Tennis channel on YouTube because I’ve been reconstructing my backhand. And even though I haven’t been able to play as much as I wanted to, little two-minute tips here just to sort of allow me to get better at that. So it’s not magic or mentalism, but this has been my little escape. So for folks who are also avid tennis players, subscribe to the Two-Minute Tennis channel, but also subscribe to Scott’s podcast, the psychology podcast. And Scott, thanks for joining us. And all of you listening, thanks for joining us, as always, on Class Disrupted.

Washington House lawmakers on Tuesday unanimously passed a bill to increase special education funding by another $185 million in the coming years.

While the funding is in line with a request from Gov. Jay Inslee, critics say it does not go far enough.

But legislative leaders, including majority Democrats, have concerns about how further increases could strain the state budget and whether removing limits on funding could open the door for some schools to claim more money than they need.

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will allow up to 17.25% of a district’s population to receive funding for support services like speech therapy and instructional aides. The Legislature increased that cap from 13.5% to 15% last year. In other words, if 20% of a district’s population requires special education services, the district cannot get additional money for the remaining 5%.

According to the , the state will spend about $28.6 million more on special education in the 2023-2025 budget, $76.5 million from 2025-2027 and $80 million from 2027-2029.

Even if the bill is approved, lawmakers would separately need to provide money in the budget for the proposed increase and if they don’t, the policy would not take effect.

Democratic Rep. Gerry Pollet of Seattle, chief sponsor of HB 2180, said “it’s unconscionable and probably unconstitutional” that Washington does not fund special education for every child who needs it.

Chris Reykdal, Washington’s chief education official, that the cap on funding breaks federal law. The cap is particularly burdensome on rural districts with smaller budgets, like Ocean Beach, would qualify for special education funding should the cap be removed.

Lawmakers from both parties have repeatedly called on the Legislature to end the cap entirely. But during the House floor debate, it was Republican lawmakers who forcefully decried it, including Rep. Travis Couture, R-Allyn, who introduced an amendment to remove the cap.

Couture, who has children with disabilities, said removing the cap would be “mere pennies” for the Legislature.

“I have to go home tonight and look my kids in the eyes and talk to families just like mine who go through the hell of IEP meetings and trying to get services and supports that are so desperately under-resourced,” said Couture, referring to individualized education plan meetings for special education students.

“At least I think I can go back tonight and look at them and say I tried everything that I could,” Couture said. “To me, it just seems like the reason that this did not occur is because it was my idea.”

Although Pollet has led the effort to remove the cap on special education in past years, he asked fellow lawmakers to vote against Couture’s amendment, saying his original bill would provide funding faster.

“Let’s do the best we can right away,” he said.

Last year, Pollet’s to gradually lift the cap before fully removing it by 2027-2028 was amended before passage to set the 15% limit that’s now in place.

Democratic leadership said they plan to support school funding in other ways, such as increasing compensation for paraeducators.

Senate Majority Leader Andy Billig, D-Spokane, said removing the cap would require reductions elsewhere in the state budget, and he welcomes Republican input on what should be cut.

“[Republicans] think they can fund everything without cutting anything,” Billig said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com. Follow Washington State Standard on and .

TOPEKA — Rep. Kristey Williams and Sen. Renee Erickson agreed there was little value in convening a task force to study the state’s shortfall in funding public school special education programs because the financial issues were too complex and the only remedy suggested by education advocacy groups was too simplistic.

The lawmakers said it would be folly to hold hearings of the Special Education and Related Services Task Force with legislators, teachers, parents and other stakeholders to gather testimony and shape recommendations on a fix for the 2024 Legislature.

The goal of the task force, required by a bill approved by the 2023 Legislature, was to figure out how best to comply with an older statute mandating that state funding cover 92% of the extra cost of providing services to K-12 special education students statewide. Currently, state aid was sufficient to address 69% of school districts’ excess special education costs. The balance must be made up by local school districts.

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“There is no way a funding task force could begin to crack that code,” said Williams, an Augusta Republican.

Erickson, a Wichita Republican, said the Kansas State Board of Education and an assortment of public education organizations had offered one remedy to the 92% dilemma — appropriation of nearly $200 million annually to close the gap.

“We do not need a special education task force meeting to consider their position,” she said. “We have their input, which is just more money. We don’t need a task force to convene to discuss that part.”

On Friday afternoon, however, Williams and Erickson were expected to sit down with others on the task force for their first and, perhaps, only meeting. The gathering might not have occurred had a six-person majority of task force members not invoked parliamentary procedure in November to force Williams’ hand. She relented and set the meeting for three days prior to start of the 2024 session.

Task force rebellion

Interim legislative meetings typically take place in summer and fall to give committee members time to write reports pulling together expert testimony and outlining reform proposals for review by lawmakers during the next legislative session.

Williams, who was placed in charge of the task force pending the members’ election of a chair, said a mere two hours would be dedicated to oral testimony of subject-matter experts and for task force deliberations. She said written testimony would be accepted by the task force comprised of five members of the House or Senate — four Republicans, one Democrat — and six people not in the Legislature.

The list of 13 given a chance to speak for five minutes each to the task force included people with the Kansas Association of School Boards, Kansas National Education Association, Kansas PTA, Game On for Kansas Schools as well as the Kansas State Department of Education and the Kansas Policy Institute. School administrators and a teacher will be given a turn at the microphone, but its not clear the task force could comprehensively take input, consider options and prepare recommendations for legislators in 120 minutes.

The first order of business must be to select a chairperson of the task force. Legislators, lobbyists and educators said that step became a flash point several months ago when it appeared Williams lacked votes among task force peers to retain the position of task force chair. In response, special education advocates said, Williams stonewalled and publicly expressed skepticism the task force was worthwhile.

In an interview in October, Louisburg GOP Sen. Molly Baumgardner, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, dismissed that theory. She said the delay wasn’t inspired by Williams’ unwillingness to give up narrative control of the task force.

“Anytime you’re trying to schedule when we’re not in session, it is a real juggling match to get folks together,” said Baumgardner, who is on the special education task force. “You’re trying to satisfy a variety of different schedules so that the largest number of folks can be there and participate and we’ve had some problems with interim meetings, just scheduling times.”

A majority of the task force made multiple requests of Williams to move ahead with the task force’s work before deploying a procedural maneuver to compel the meeting. Williams set the meeting for 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Friday in Room 112-North of the Capitol.

‘Not … going away’

Kansas spends more than $500 million annually in federal, state and local funding on special education services in public schools, but hasn’t complied with the 92% requirement since 2011. However, the statute didn’t include enforcement mechanisms to compel the Legislature to meet the obligation.

The idea of convening a task force was viewed as an alternative to the 2023 Legislature dealing with a situation in which districts had to pull money from the general education budget to fill the special education gap. Instead of allocating $182 million to meet the statewide shortfall in the 2023-2024 school year, the Legislature agreed to increase appropriations for special education by $7.6 million for the year.

Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, endorsed a plan to add $72 million in 2024 to initiate a five-year plan to surge special education aid to 92%. The state Board of Education preferred a four-year strategy that would infuse $82 million annually to reach that threshold.

Williams and other legislators rejected the phased concepts and endorsed appointment of a task force on special education. She also urged the Legislature to complete a rewrite of the state’s special education funding blueprint by 2027.

Rep. Adam Thomas, an Olathe Republican on the task force, said he was convinced the Legislature had to rework the state’s special education formula to correct inconsistencies in distribution of money to districts.

“The formula itself is confusing. There’s some flaws in statute,” he said. “Obviously, we know after all these conversations about special ed, it’s not something that’s going to go away.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on and .

Idaho State University has been awarded $2.2 million in grants to train students and educators who will work with children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.

Idaho State University’s Department of Communications and Disorders was awarded two grants from the Office of Special Education Personnel Preparation that will make $2.2 million in grant funding available over the next five years, according to a news release last week by Idaho State University.

The Idaho Hearing Education and Aural Rehabilitation program, often referred to as the HEAR program, will use the grant funding for training, tuition and stipends for 42 students who are studying to become service providers in speech language pathology or audiology, university officials said. Grant funding will also support educators who teach children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.

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“The model we have running family-to-family support through a university is unique in the country and comes with benefits that are particularly helpful in a rural state like Idaho,” Idaho State University Professor Kristina Blaiser, the grant recipient and principal investigator for the HEAR program, said in a written statement. “The integration of technology helps bring families together, regardless of their geographic locations. Instead of feeling isolated with a low incidence diagnosis, families feel connected and empowered.”

Idaho State University officials said the program will benefit Idaho parents and families because there is a shortage of speech language pathologists, audiologists and early intervention personnel in the state.

“As a parent of a child who is hard-of-hearing, I can attest that there is significant need for this type of training program,” Pocatello parent Shelly Estevez said in a written statement provided by ISU.

University officials said they plan to accept the first cohort of students into the HEAR program in fall 2024.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com. Follow Idaho Capital Sun on and .

Several of the documents were internal memos about special education services and litigation brought against the district by two former students who alleged they’d been sexually assaulted. One spreadsheet identified at least 60 students struggling with mental health issues, including some who had been hospitalized or engaged in self harm.

Investigators said that in the future, attorneys should review and label files before a parent inspects them and urged staff throughout the district to be trained on the “importance of redacting and safeguarding confidential information.” In Thursday, Superintendent Michelle Reid said the district would comply with all of the recommendations.

The brief summary of leaves several questions unanswered, including which district officials were responsible for the disclosure and how such a massive breach occurred after a string of similar incidents in recent years.

The 74 first reported on the most recent episode on Nov. 1, two weeks after Callie Oettinger, a parent in the district, reviewed documents that she requested on her own children, a daughter in high school and a son who graduated in 2022.��She discovered later that the information she copied and downloaded onto thumb drives included private information on thousands of other students.

The disclosure was just the latest in a series of student privacy incidents within the 178,000-student district in recent years. In 2020, obtained Social Security numbers, birthdates and other data on over 170,000 students and employees. In the early weeks of the pandemic, students were subjected to racist and obscene comments and other harassment in that weren’t protected with a password. And multiple parents told The 74 they have mistakenly received other students’ special education records or that their children’s information has been shared with other parents or staff members. 

In 2019, a former superintendent apologized when staff members forwarded information on Oettinger’s son to the wrong people and promised to train staff to prevent future occurences. But in 2021, the district released private data on about a dozen students to another parent, Debra Tisler. Tisler shared the information with Oettinger, a special education advocate, who published redacted versions on . The district sued both parents to get the records back, but .��

A day after The 74’s report, Reid apologized and announced that a firm with expertise in cybersecurity — — would investigate how the incident occured. Nearly six weeks later, parents whose children were named in the records received a letter notifying them of the disclosure and the district set up a phone line to provide them with more information.��

The summary of the investigation showed that “older thumb drives containing unredacted files” were “unintentionally and unknowingly left within boxes accessible” to Oettinger when she went to her local high school for an in-person review of her children’s records. The probe also included “a forensic examination of a laptop” Oettinger used while she was there.

But Oettinger said the lead investigator, Beth Waller, never contacted her. Waller did not return calls or emails seeking comment.��

Reid’s letter to families stated that Oettinger and her attorney “provided declarations under oath and penalty of perjury stating they have deleted and do not have any of the identifiable student information that was involved in this incident.”

Oettinger said she wished the district had made greater efforts to clarify that she didn’t release any student’s private information.��

She published examples of the documents on her advocacy website to further underscore the point that the district didn’t protect sensitive student data. But she redacted personal identifying information before posting.��

The investigators called the incident “a unique set of circumstances” and an “unusual review,” another description Oettinger objects to. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act gives parents the right to review records in person.��

In Fairfax, parents are split over whether Oettinger did the right thing in failing to initially inform the district of the error.��

“How do we file a lawsuit against her?” one asked on Facebook. “Let’s def (sic) all band together!”

Another wrote, “Do you understand the stress and anxiety you have caused to thousands of families in your self-righteous quest for ‘justice?’ “

But Oettinger said past privacy violations made her skeptical that the district would properly address the matter.

Other parents defended Oettinger’s actions. “If she hadn’t reported it to the public, we would never have known about it,” said Jill Janson, who has two children whose information were included in the records released. “If [Fairfax County Public Schools] isn’t uber careful with a parent they have a long history with regarding data spills, then just how careful are they with a regular person off the street?”

Oettinger has complained several times to the Virginia Department of Education about the October disclosure. But state officials maintain that the district does not have a systemic problem. 

In October, following a previous complaint, the state said the district had assured officials that staff members would receive training on student privacy. That training began Oct. 31, but the district did not respond to a question on how many staff members completed it.��

“This school division is the Commonwealth’s largest,” Cecil Creasey Jr., a state hearing officer, wrote Dec. 11 when he ruled on an appeal from Oettinger. The district’s size, he said, is not an excuse, but helps to explain why such errors occurred.

But Oettinger and other critics argue the district should be able to secure student privacy given the millions of dollars it spends on legal fees.

“I have heard ‘human error’ too many times through the years,” Oettinger said. “It isn’t an excuse. Can you imagine the president accidentally including Putin in an email and then blaming human error?”

It came last summer in a white envelope she couldn’t wait to open. Hillary Barber, 29, had already interviewed for a position at a soon-to-open coffee house in Sleepy Hollow, 45 minutes north of Manhattan, but didn’t know if she earned a spot. 

A witty and tenacious young woman with a megawatt smile, Barber has cerebral palsy, a condition that limits her mobility and makes it difficult for her to speak. Like so many other developmentally disabled adults across the country — and, particularly, in — she had trouble finding work after she graduated from high school in 2013 at age 19. 

That letter, she hoped, could change everything.

“It is with great pleasure that I extend the following employment offer to you,” read the invitation from the nonprofit Sleepy Coffee, Too, founded by former special education teacher Kim Kaczmarek.  

“I’m so happy,” Barber told an aide that night. “My life is complete.”

It would mark Barber’s first-ever paid work, an enormous victory for a young woman who was too often underestimated: Just were employed in 2022, up from 19.1% the year before, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For those without a disability, the figure was 65.4% in 2022, up from 63.7 percent the prior year.

A smaller offshoot of what will soon be Sleepy Coffee, Too — called The Little Shop of Coffee and Dry Goods — opened in a cozy 700-square-foot storefront in June 2023, employing Barber and 16 other adults with developmental disabilities. Kaczmarek, 64, came out of retirement to open the store, staking $125,000 of her own money on the venture.

Many of her employees are her former students. The staff is devoted — they ask their families to reschedule vacations and other outings around their shifts — and eager to take on the working world’s challenges. That exposure has greatly improved their communication skills. 

“I had some kids who were virtually nonverbal who are now some of my best customer service employees,” Kaczmarek said. “They found their voice.”

As the employees are growing, so is the business. Sleepy Coffee, Too is poised to move to an adjacent downtown location in the next few months that will double its size and allow the shop to expand its hours. 

On a recent rainy Sunday afternoon, customer traffic was slow but employee Maggie Collier, 21, was ready to help anyone who walked through the door. Sitting behind the counter, she spent the afternoon brewing coffee and refilling the store’s milk, sugar, sweeteners, cups, stirrers and napkins. 

The store, neatly stocked with all manner of coffee, is packed with other items, too, including books written by and on behalf of disabled adults and sold by the family of a Long Island man with Down syndrome. 

A mannequin in the left-hand corner models a brown zippered sweatshirt and baseball cap emblazoned with the store’s logo while a waist-high display case offers cookies and granola Like many of its coffee house competitors, the store’s walls and shelves are adorned with signs bearing cheeky messages like, “Espresso Yourself.”

Collier, who learned of the shop through her father’s friend, the also now-retired schools superintendent in neighboring Tarrytown and Kaczmarek’s former boss, is eager for the new space to open. An avid baker, she’s excited about adding snacks to the menu.

“I’m looking forward to working with more customers in a larger coffee shop,” she said. “And I like working with people my age. I like taking initiative.” 

Dreams of a coffee shop during COVID

Kaczmarek has long known her students had a hard time beating employment odds. The pandemic made their plight even more difficult. During that dark time, the former teacher’s heart would break when she saw her former students on the streets of this Hudson River village that’s home to Washington Irving’s legends, the headless horseman and Ichabod Crane. 

Their regression was stark, Kaczmarek said. Young people whom she coached for years to meet her gaze and engage in polite conversation were now averting their eyes. The educator didn’t want further isolation to undermine any more of her — or her students’ — good work. But she didn’t immediately know how to help. 

The teacher reflected on the successful coffee cart she and her students opened — she used it to help them learn about operating a small business and to fundraise for their field trips — in her district’s administrative office in 2016 and how it grew even more popular at the high school. 

Neurotypical students designed and helped build a cart complete with display cases, lights and locking wheels. Students and staff proved devoted patrons: Sleepy Coffee’s brownies would sell out in minutes each morning.

“There was a respect toward my students that had never been there before,” Kaczmarek recalled. “I think it really changed the culture of school.”

She remembered how members of the football team would high-five her kids as they passed each other in the hall. Kaczmarek’s classroom was in the main hallway and her students were highly visible.

“The more they were out doing things that everyone else did, it made not just the students, but the staff realize we are more the same than different,” she said. “They want to have friends, a boyfriend or girlfriend, to be invited to places. It took the stigma away. It became normal. The other students got it very quickly.”

But how could she translate that sense of fairness and inclusion to the outside world? Would the general public have the same goodwill? Sure, she had seen it done before. But it had been decades.

Helping Adam

Kaczmarek was 11 years old when a developmentally disabled boy was born to a family across the street in her hometown of Briarcliff Manor, just north of Sleepy Hollow. This was the 1960s, an era when many such children were immediately sent off to live in institutions, often at the . 

Not Adam. 

His family wanted to keep him close, but they couldn’t care for him alone. So, they invited friends and family to work and play with him each day in shifts.

“His mother had a big schedule in the house and people signed up and were given fast training,” said Kaczmarek, who was among the volunteers. 

Back then, she said, the favored technique was “patterning,” a series of exercises meant to help children with neurological impairments. That, and trying to build Adam’s gross motor skills. 

“It really had an impact on me, watching my neighborhood come together like that,” Kaczmarek said. “It was an incredible time.”

And it taught her a lesson that would become her mantra. 

“There is always a way to solve any problem,” she said. “When people work together, miracles can happen.”

‘It turned out to be good’

Kaczmarek went on to earn a bachelor’s in special education from Syracuse University and a master’s from Fordham. Adam eventually became one of her students. 

She hoped — if she could only figure out how — to generate the same support for her former students today, and approached them to gauge their interest in opening a brick-and-mortar coffee shop. They were elated at the thought. 

Kaczmarek inherited the $125,000 seed money from her parents and remembered what her father told her just before he died: Don’t wait too long to do whatever it is you want to do with the rest of your life.

She’s then raised an additional $200,000 through grants, donations and fundraising and she’s always looking for more to add staff and expand their hours. 

Adam’s sister, Kaczmarek’s friend since childhood, grew up to run a successful coffee shop of her own and has become a valuable mentor. And another friend in the community alerted Kaczmarek to the bigger spot her shop will soon occupy: It was abandoned and available for rent at a reasonable price. 

Kaczmarek’s students have been working on the project for well more than a year, meeting at first through Zoom and then in person as they opened the first storefront. 

“They are stimulated every day. They have an obligation. They are part of a business,” she said. 

Jake Loerker, 24, worked at a movie theater taking tickets, handing out snacks and vacuuming the floor before he landed at the Beekman Avenue shop, where he mostly handles money. 

“You know what?” he said of Sleepy Coffee, Too. “It turned out to be good. The customers are friendly.”

Elvira Juarez, who worked as Kaczmarek’s teaching assistant, serves on the nonprofit’s board of directors and whose child is among the shop’s employees, has watched her 31-year-old daughter blossom as her involvement with the coffee shop grew. So excited about work, she prepares for her shift days in advance. 

“On Thursday and Friday, she’s always getting her uniform ready even though it’s not until two days after,” Juarez said. “She’s always making sure it’s clean.” 

Hillary Barber, the young woman who got her first paying job at 29 and who uses adaptive technology to communicate, treats her job with the same dedication. 

Though it was a challenge, she was determined to operate the register from her wheelchair and after a few modifications to the store, she did just that. Janis, her mother and herself retired special education teacher, is grateful that Kaczmarek gave her daughter a chance. 

“She is definitely smart,” the mother said of Hillary. “She picks up things quickly. But this was really her first opportunity to work. I’m so grateful for Kim.”

In a federal court motion filed Nov. 14 that cited The 74’s exclusive reporting, attorney Andrew Brenner described the disclosure as “at best, careless,” particularly after the former student won a legal battle against the district for her right to remain anonymous. Brenner asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to compel Fairfax to explain how her name ended up in documents released as part of a records request that had nothing to do with her case.

A hearing on the motion is set for Dec. 15.

Known as B.R., the woman is as well as the former students she alleges sexually assaulted her in 2011, with a trial set to begin in March. The motion asks for the names of all district employees involved in producing the materials that identified her as well as the district’s steps “to collect, review, compile and transmit the documents” prior to their release.

The district’s response to the motion could provide insight into how unredacted records on tens of thousands of students were released to a parent and special education advocate. The documents included sensitive, confidential information such as grades, disability status and mental health conditions.

Following The 74’s report, the district apologized and launched an investigation. A firm with expertise in cybersecurity — — is handling the probe, but some parents with children named in the disclosure said so far, no one has contacted them. Superintendent Michelle Reid said in she will share a summary of the investigation once it’s complete.

Callie Oettinger, the parent who received the records, went to her local high school in mid-October to examine what she thought were records pertaining to her own two children. Her son, who received special education services in the district, has since graduated, and her daughter is still in high school. She copied computer files onto thumb drives as a paralegal observed and helped her identify some of the records. 

While most of the documents set aside for her review included her children’s names, they also revealed information on what she estimates were at least 35,000 other students. B.R.’s full name was listed in a document labeled “attorney work product” and marked “privileged and confidential,” as well as in an email to board members about litigation to discuss in a 2020 closed meeting.

The records also identified another former student with a separate Title IX case against the district. In reached last year, the district agreed to always redact the student’s real name from any copy of the document and only use a pseudonym when referring to the case. Her attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.

The day after issuing its apology, the district sent Oettinger a strongly worded email demanding that she “return all files removed, including any and all physical media used for unauthorized extraction of information from FCPS.” The letter referred to the documents as “wrongfully retained information.”

To her attorney, the language suggested Oettinger was at fault. 

“She’s done nothing illegal, and they have no legal right to compel her to do anything,” said Timothy Sandefur, vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix-based libertarian think tank. Oettinger posted redacted documents from the recent trove on she runs on special education issues. “If they want assurance that she is not going to publish any kind of confidential information about kids, she absolutely will not publish confidential information about children. She has assured everybody of that already.”

Oettinger sent the thumb drives to Sandefur, who has since communicated with attorneys conducting the district’s investigation. But he declined to provide an update on the district’s progress. The attorneys conducting the investigation also didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A need for ‘robust action’

Oettinger didn’t initially alert the district to the disclosure because, she said, it has failed to make improvements after previous privacy violations. In fact, on Oct. 19 — the third and final day that Oettinger reviewed files in person — the Virginia Department of Education responded to one of her earlier complaints, finding the Fairfax district out of compliance with the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.

The decision only pertained to her son and was not a statement about the district’s overall privacy record.

Patricia Haymes, who directs the state agency’s Office of Dispute Resolution and Administrative Services, noted that officials have had “ongoing concerns” regarding student confidentiality in Fairfax and “believed that there was a need for the school division to take more robust action to ensure sustainable compliance.” But she also said the district assured her in September that it was taking steps “regarding the confidentiality of and access to student records.”

In that Sept. 27 letter, the district said it was training staff on their obligations under FERPA and the Freedom of Information Act, and was planning a “mandatory training” for principals and other administrators in charge of student records and special education. Training was scheduled to begin Oct. 31 and employees have two months to complete it. 

On. Nov. 8, Oettinger appealed the state’s decision, citing The 74’s reporting on the accidental records release. Both the district and the state have “failed to ensure compliance — and now here we are,” she wrote. “You have enough for [the district] to be found at fault for systemic noncompliance.” 

The district disputes that it has violated the law. In a Nov. 21 response to Oettinger’s appeal, it described the disclosure as a “single instance of what appears to be human error” and said that Oettinger’s in-person review of the documents, which FERPA allows, was “outside the typical electronic document production that FCPS employs.“

Oettinger said she has faith in Reid, who became superintendent last year, to push for tighter security.  The two have exchanged emails and met in person multiple times. Oettinger said she’s “choosing to believe Reid’s trying to change the district’s culture and that she knows me enough to know I’d never do anything nefarious.”

Some special education experts in the state are baffled by the district’s mistake. 

“It’s just the norm that when you do a document production, you are careful about what you shouldn’t be disclosing — whether it’s other students’ names or legal advice,” said Jim Wheaton, a William and Mary Law School professor who runs a legal clinic for future attorneys that plan to work on special education issues. “It just blows my mind that they would be so reckless.”

But he said that there’s not much parents can do about such violations. They can file complaints, but there’s no right to sue under FERPA.

“In religious terms,” he said, “it’s, ‘Go forth and sin no more.’”

At the same time, an analysis by The 74 of Minnesota’s teacher licensing records found that during the 2022-23 academic year, more than 1,500 licensed special educators — comprising 16% of teachers credentialed to work with students with disabilities — chose to work in regular classrooms. 

And more than a fourth of teachers working with students with disabilities — 27%, or nearly 3,000 — lacked any special education credential. Licensed to teach language arts, social studies, music, health and other general education subjects, in many cases their schools have a state waiver to place them with students with disabilities.

The one-two punch leaves thousands of the state’s most vulnerable children — among those hit hardest by the pandemic losses — without qualified teachers at a crucial juncture. Many received little or none of the specialized instruction they are legally entitled to during COVID’s school disruptions. They have not bounced back to their dismal pre-pandemic achievement rates of at grade level.

“Kids with disabilities are never the top priority,” says Wendy Tucker, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Learner Equity, which researches and promotes quality in special education. “They just keep getting pushed down the list.” 

Even in normal times, federal civil rights laws require school systems to make up services children with disabilities don’t receive for whatever reason. But as is the case in many places, the reality in Minnesota is that districts are closing specialized programs or moving kids into makeshift settings. 

To push districts to prioritize a particularly vulnerable subset of children, U.S. civil rights laws don’t allow school systems to use a shortage of qualified educators to justify denying students with learning differences the services they need to succeed. Disability advocates have long complained that the practice of assigning available but unqualified educators to special education classrooms is illegal because it is a key barrier to students making academic progress. 

It’s easy to understand why administrators are exhausted meeting the bare-bones goal of having students safe and supervised, Tucker acknowledges, but for kids it’s the start of a very slippery slope: “It’s a vicious cycle. Low expectations are met, because the supports weren’t there, because there were low expectations.”

Minnesota licensing officials refused to comment on The 74’s findings about the number of special education teachers choosing not to work in the area or the high rate of jobs being filled by educators lacking special education credentials. When asked about the number of special education teachers who leave their jobs for general education classrooms, Yelena Bailey, executive director of the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board, said in an email that the board does not have that information: “We do not have attrition rate data due to limitations of our data system. We hope to hire someone in the coming months who can help put this together manually.”

In a , the board has calculated annual attrition rates for teachers overall since 2017, when a new licensing system went into effect. The data shows that nearly a third of all new teachers hired since then leave within five years — better than the national average — and includes, where known, their reasons for quitting. 

The report does not include information on special educators who leave. Nor does the licensing board tally actual vacancies overall, instead reporting the percentage of districts that say they have hard-to-fill openings by subject area. In lieu of the number of people schools would have to hire to be fully staffed, it uses the number of educators in all fields with waivers to work outside their licensure area and those with entry-level credentials who are working toward permanent licensure as a proxy. 

When broken down by area of expertise, special education of specialties taught by teachers without appropriate, permanent licenses. Last year, there were 2,000. 

A lack of hard numbers outside of the assignment data examined by The 74 makes it impossible to know how many of Minnesota’s 153,000 pre-K-12 children receiving special ed services aren’t being taught by a qualified educator. Minnesota education advocates have pressed — unsuccessfully so far — for laws requiring better data collection.

But news stories and anecdotal accounts from family advocates suggest that the number is at crisis levels. At the start of the year, the state’s largest system, the Anoka-Hennepin School District, announced it was at least temporarily closing an entire specialized school for some of its most profoundly disabled students. Last year, it had 53 special educators working in general education classrooms, according to licensing records.

Minneapolis Public Schools last year canceled some in-person instruction, moving many disabled pupils back online for summer services — despite the fact that the extra instruction was needed to make up for ineffective distance learning. Last year, it had 54 teachers licensed to teach in special education that weren’t. The district started this year with disproportionately clustered in its most impoverished schools.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook with parents saying, ‘My kid doesn’t have a teacher, or they have a long-term sub or their school is trying to pull something together using the available people in the building,’ ” says Maren Christenson, executive director of the Multicultural Autism Action Network, a nonprofit serving Somali and Oromo families in Minnesota. 

“We were in a crisis before the pandemic,” she says. “It’s really disingenuous of school districts to say they are taken by surprise. We’ve known this was coming for a long time.”

‘It’s not just a pipeline issue’

Inattention to the high rate at which special education teachers quit for easier teaching jobs, say disability advocates, combined with a stop-gap approach to filling the resulting vacancies, make a reckoning about the quality of special education long overdue. Research shows that given proper instruction, most children with disabilities can achieve at grade level. Yet particularly in the wake of the pandemic’s school closures, when many special ed students were deprived entirely of services, it’s not clear they’ll have the chance.

According to a small but showing what could keep special educators on the job, a handful of key factors propel many into general education. that 20% of new Washington state teachers who earned both a special education and a regular classroom credential chose not to take a job teaching students with disabilities at all. Other research has found that special educators are than other teachers to leave teaching altogether and 72% more likely to leave a job for one in another school.

Whether the departures are from special ed or from teaching altogether, advocacy groups say the turnover perpetuates the problem, as increased shortages translate to higher caseloads for those who remain, in turn making the job less sustainable. With more jobs to fill, administrators also are more likely to tap teachers who are willing to take them but who lack appropriate licenses.

Dan Goldhaber, vice president of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, has studied the special educator workforce. The high number of special educators working outside the field documented by The 74’s analysis echoes his own research, he says. 

“These are not new issues,” says Goldhaber, noting that the ongoing lack of special educators differs from shortfalls in other areas such as science, math, engineering and technology. “In special education, it’s not just a pipeline issue, it’s an attrition issue.”

Minneapolis teacher Tameika Williams made it through one of the pipeline-priming programs officials are counting on to ease the shortage only to find the work impossible, she said. She belongs to the Minnesota chapter of Educators for Excellence, whose leaders have heard enough stories like hers to form a task force on working conditions in special ed. 

A Black woman who grew up without any teachers who looked like her or a sense of belonging in school, Williams said she never envisioned herself as an educator. She was employed by a community organization that supported families when the principal of one of the schools she worked in remarked that Williams had an affinity for connecting with youth with disabilities. A program at a local university would help her get a graduate degree and teaching credential for free. 

As she was earning a master’s, Williams started teaching special ed in Minneapolis Public Schools, working entirely with students of color. She says she logged twice as many hours as she was supposed to. 

After four years, however, Williams was done. When she told her principal she was quitting, he proposed she stay as the teacher in charge of a career-training program that gives students an early jump on becoming educators themselves through early college courses. Her classes now include both students with and without disabilities, but she does not have to deal with the daunting workload she had as a special educator.

The administrator she reported to before she changed jobs, Williams said, had criticized her for insisting on teaching history, saying none of her students were college bound. Williams persisted, though. Understanding the multi-generational impact of inadequate education on students of color and children with disabilities — material she was not exposed to until college — was what, Williams said, finally convinced her to get a teaching credential.  

She still harbors ambivalence about the fact that some of her current students with IEPs are considering becoming special education teachers. On the one hand, more educators living with disabilities themselves would boost children receiving special education, now often not educated to be college- or career-ready. On the other, she’s not confident that they, too, won’t be pressured to dumb down the curriculum.  

“I’m not gonna lie, I have some conflicting values still around encouraging young Black kids to become teachers,” she says. “I have the rooted belief that all kids are capable.”

Stories like Williams’s are common everywhere, say teachers. The Illinois chapter of the educator advocacy organization Teach Plus has collected information from members who say special education requires radical change to be a sustainable job. 

After seven years in a special education classroom in Chicago Public Schools, Bridget Rood said she was of knowing that she wasn’t preparing the students in her program, which existed to help them make the transition to adulthood, well for life after school.  

“I was depressed, I was dysregulated,” she says. “I didn’t feel fulfilled at all. I don’t think I had one student in those seven years who [went on to job training or more education].”

A Teach Plus fellowship gave Rood both a break and, as she a colleagues conducted , a sense of how pervasive feelings like hers were. Sixty-two percent of special educators they surveyed ranked an acceptable workload as the first- or second-most important thing to them. In addition to teaching, the special educators Teach Plus consulted said they strained to find time to do paperwork, talk to families, create behavior intervention plans and their own curriculum on the fly while also managing support staff. 

After her fellowship, Rood went to work for a more affluent district on Chicago’s north side, Niles Township High School District 219. More resources means she does not have to scrounge to find curriculum or other instructional resources. She is still responsible for paperwork, but a departmental secretary takes care of a huge number of repetitive, time-consuming tasks, such as making sure the right people are scheduled to attend the meetings where students’ plans are discussed, completing the boilerplate sections of those plans and collecting data for progress reports.

“It is literal night and day,” she says. “It’s also made me realize — without tooting my own horn — that I am good at what I do and I do make a difference.”

‘This person has a harder job’

Again, this comes as little surprise to national researchers. Because of the paperwork involved in each student’s legally required Individualized Education Program, or IEP, special educators must work more hours than other teachers — almost always for the same pay. Recently, administrators in Hawaii, Detroit and Atlanta have had dramatic success filling vacancies with new hires and licensed special educators already on the payroll but not in classrooms serving disabled kids by offering annual incentives of $10,000, $15,000 and $3,000, respectively.

Only one Minnesota district, St. Paul Public Schools, has tried the approach. Its offer of a $10,000 hiring bonus filled its 70 openings for the 2023-24 school year in a few weeks. 

Historically, school systems are reluctant to consider paying some teachers more than others based on anything but education and experience, says Chad Aldeman, a 74 contributor and researcher who tracks the education labor market. 

“Historically, unions have opposed offering special incentives for teachers who work in shortage areas or hard-to-staff schools,” he says. “We as a country have treated teachers universally and not said, ‘This person has a harder job.’”

Yet while there is evidence that large financial incentives can be an effective way of filling special education vacancies, new on Hawaii’s foray into differentiated pay found that it may not significantly impact their retention.   

Teach Plus’s report also flags teacher training and early career mentorship as factors that educators say would keep them from floundering as they learn the job. Colleges of education vary in how much classroom exposure would-be special education teachers get, with hands-on preparation ranging from a few weeks student teaching under a general education teacher to year-long residencies with a skilled special educator. 

In terms of mentorship, the Illinois survey found that support for some new teachers consisted of brief check-ins — sometimes consisting of phone calls during the evening commute — with veteran colleagues. In Minneapolis, Williams said she spent her first year on a team with no one more experienced than her. 

Many states that have confronted special educator shortages chiefly by trying to increase the supply of new teachers. Minnesota advocates have applauded slowly but steadily growing scholarships for teacher candidates who agree to get their special education certification. But they are critical of how officials have expended their energy, complaining that the needs of kids with disabilities have taken a back seat to politics. 

In 2016, in the wake of a decade of lawsuits, legal reforms, and an audit pronouncing the licensing system irretrievably broken, state lawmakers passed a wholesale overhaul, creating a new agency — the current board — to oversee it. One of its mandates was to make it more straightforward for teachers of color and nontraditional candidates to enter the classroom. To that end, lawmakers created a system where, depending on their education and experience, potential teachers could start work on a temporary credential and go on to earn a permanent one. 

The new system, which went into effect in 2017, was successful, allowing 2,000 special educators to start work. But last year, based on lobbying from the state’s traditional colleges of education and the teachers union that also represents their faculty — who have played a major role on the appointed licensure board — lawmakers agreed to begin reversing the changes. Next year, board leaders say they plan to seek further contractions.

The irony, say advocates, is that the special educator pipeline is narrowing dramatically even as scant attention is being paid to what equips a new special educator to do a very hard job well, and what might keep them in it. 

“What we need to do is really work backward and figure out what creates a high-quality special ed teacher,” says Josh Crosson, executive director of EdAllies, an advocacy group that has been pushing for teacher licensing reforms in Minnesota for more than a decade. “What schools are they [working in]? Are there trends within those schools? What preparation programs are those schools recruiting from? ? Mentorship models? Residency models? 

“We don’t have any of that data. We’re really just guessing.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to Teach Plus, Educators for Excellence, the Center for Learner Equity and The 74. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Joyce Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to Teach Plus, Educators for Excellence and The 74. The Mind Trust provides financial support to Teach Plus and The 74. The Nellie Mae Education Foundation provides financial support for Educators for Excellence and The 74.

Jennifer Church, the lead special education teacher at Pelham Ridge Elementary School in Pelham, knows how much her colleagues do before stepping into a classroom.

“The referral meetings, eligibility meetings, IEP (individualized educational plan) meetings, the parent contacts just to organize all of that,” she said. “Writing the IEPS … providing the services to the students each day and then also helping with any general education assignments that need to be helped with in the classroom.”

And to keep special education teachers in place, the Alabama State Department of Education is asking the Legislature for a little bit more.

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The department’s budget request includes a call for a stipend for special education teachers in the hopes of recruiting new teachers and retaining existing ones in areas with shortages.

Michael Sibley, spokesman for the department, said over email that the stipend amount requested is $5,000 and 20% ($1,000) benefits for each teacher.

A new teacher in Alabama with a bachelor’s degree would make A new teacher in Mississippi at a would make A new teacher in Georgia with a would make the base teacher salary in Tennessee is $42,000.

Special education is a term that covers a range of specialties, and special education teachers work with students with a range of needs. Some of those specialties have greater shortages than others. But the department for now but, for now, they are looking at a flat stipend across the board for special education teachers.

Mackey said the goal is to convince people to become special education teachers.

“This year, the Legislature provided a $1,000 stipend but it only went to special ed teachers who were paid for out of the state budget, foundation program budget,” he said.

This year’s request would cover teachers paid for by federal and local funds, as well. His goal is to provide the stipends for every special education teacher in the state.

Both Mackey and special education educators across the state have said that it’s important that specially trained teachers are the ones who work with special education students.

“If you’re a parent of a child that has these really severe needs, then you want to make sure you have the most qualified teacher working with them,” he said.

Akeliah Palmer, a collaborative resource and special education teacher at Edgewood Elementary School in Selma, said that she has about 30 students on her caseload.

She said that special education is hard to staff, so she hopes the stipend might help in recruiting.

“For them to keep the stipend would be a great idea because it may recruit more workers to come over to [special education],” she said.

Church said that forging personal relationships is also important for her role as a special education teacher.

“It’s not just one blanket plan for the children,” she said. “It’s individualized to each child. So we write these for their strengths, their weaknesses, the services that they need. It also has to be legally defensible.”

Cynthia Rysedorph, special education department chair at Mountain Brook High School, said that she thinks a stipend could encourage teachers to stay in the classroom.

“It was somewhat empowering, I think, just to feel recognized,” she said about this past year’s stipend..

Retention is critical, Mackey said, because of the volume of work special education teachers do.

“Because of special ed is obviously an area that’s intense focus, there is a lot of additional paperwork because the significance of some federal rules around that, so we often hear teachers say, ‘You know what, I’m going to leave teaching special ed, and just teach fourth grade, because it’s the same pay,’” he said.

Mackey said that the department is targeting teachers trained and certified to teach both special education and elementary general education. Some of those teachers might have gone to general education, and he wants the stipend to encourage them to come back to special education. He said those teachers are certified under collaborative special education.

For now, he said, the department is looking at a flat stipend, but Mackey left open the possibility of offering more in areas with particular shortages.

“That’s something certainly could be discussed,” he said. “Like, you know, the Legislature comes back and wants to talk about, ‘Well, what if we do a different amount for a child, for a teacher who has students with learning disabilities versus one with students who have medical disabilities?”

Last year, the Department asked for $68 million and received $4.6 million for special education stipends. This year, the department has requested for $34 million. House education budget chair Danny Garrett, R-Trussville, said in October he did not have any information about the funding this year going up as he has not seen the request or had discussions.

The Alabama State Board of Education’s budget request goes to the governor’s office. The governor makes a recommendation of her version that then goes to the Legislature who will approve their version of the budget.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on and .

The West Virginia Board of Education declared a state of emergency in Hampshire County Schools special education program after nearly three years of shortcomings for vulnerable students.

The board’s decision, issued on Wednesday during their monthly meeting, requires the school district to address issues, including missing services, staffing and a lacking graduation rate for students in special education.

Hampshire County Schools serve 2,800 students. About 20% of students — or around one out of every five kids — have Individual Education Plans, or IEPs, that require special education services and staffing.

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Alexandra Criner, director of the West Virginia Department of Education Office of Accountability, told school board members that the district needed ‘substantial intervention.” The district often used a “one size fits all approach” for students in special education, she said, and students weren’t always placed in the most appropriate classroom settings.

Teachers and administrators across the district have expressed the need for help to address ongoing special education issues in eight schools, she noted, adding that one district employee supported 500 students with IEPs.

“Teachers [and] principals felt overwhelmed by the procedural aspect of special education,” Criner said.

Hampshire County Schools Superintendent Jeffrey Pancione did not respond to an interview request for this story.

There are special education shortcomings , according to state reviews, and the state is experiencing a in the critical area. Statewide, more than 45,000 students need special education services, according to the West Virginia Developmental Disabilities Council.

An October report from the WVDE showed that 14 counties, including Hampshire, with their special education.

The WVDE Office of Accountability reported shortcomings in Hampshire County’s special education programs in 2021, 2022 and this year.

After the school district failed to make improvements, the office conducted a special circumstance review of the school district in September. The WVDE Office of Accountability reviewed a random sample of dozens of special education students’ files.

“We reviewed 45 IEP files to verify the time and duration of services,” Criner said. “Twenty-nine of those 45 IEPs had at least one unverifiable service.”

Some records were incomplete or out of date, she added.

Additionally, the district had failed to improve its graduation outcomes for students with disabilities, despite over the last two years receiving more than $95,000 to address the issue, according to a WVDE .

“The use [of those] funds has not resulted in improvement of that data,” Criner said.

The WVDE laid out a number of necessary improvements for the Hampshire County Schools, including making sure all students with IEPs received the necessary special education services. Curriculum improvements were needed, as well.

The report did note that “safe and appropriate student behavior was observed in the majority of classrooms.”

The school system will receive state support and oversight to implement the recommendations under the state of emergency declaration.

“Within six months, if they haven’t made progress, we’ll see if additional steps need to be taken,” said Michele Blatt, state superintendent of schools.

The state board of education of Logan County schools in 2022 after an investigation revealed numerous problems that included special education shortcomings. The district still remains under state control.

Upshur County Schools is also under state control due to misspending of in federal COVID-19 pandemic relief money. A state review showed the money was spent on things like pool passes and bed and breakfast retreats.

Former state schools superintendent David Roach announced his retirement as the problem came to light over the summer.

State School Board President Paul Hardesty questioned if the state could do more to monitor county’s special education programs before it needed emergency-level intervention.

“Is there some way we can identify and help these people … so that it doesn’t get to a crisis? That’s something we need to strive for, because this is our most at risk population — these are children who have the most needs,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

Idaho’s schools have a $66.5 million problem — and it’s impacting the state’s most vulnerable students.

Since its inception, special education has been underfunded nationwide.

Public schools are required to provide special services to fulfill the needs of students of all abilities — but they often aren’t given the money to do so, at least not all of it. The federal government’s promise to fund 40% of states’ special ed costs has never been fulfilled, and state governments often don’t make up the difference.

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“For as long as I’ve been teaching and I’ve been in education, there has been a discrepancy between what a district spends to educate the students requiring special education services and what they’re actually reimbursed,” said Ryan Cantrell, a longtime educator and current chief deputy superintendent at the State Department of Education.

In Idaho, school districts and charters are left to fill that gap — and it’s nearing $67 million.

That hole causes local education agencies (a term that refers to public school districts and charters) to pinch pennies, shift around money, dip into discretionary funds and turn to local taxpayers to foot the bill. It contributes to high turnover rates among special education teachers and paraprofessionals, and ultimately can impact the level of resources and attention that students receive.

Education leaders know there’s a problem. But with an antiquated funding formula, which hasn’t been rewritten since 1994, and little movement from the federal government, solutions are hard to come by.

“It leaves districts to look at their own district budgets, and ask themselves: How are we going to cover the gap between what we receive from the federal government and what we receive from the State of Idaho, compared to the actual costs for our students to receive a special education?” said Cantrell.

Special education funding is complicated

There are nearly 37,000 special education students in Idaho — that’s about 11.6% of the state’s total student population.

Let’s put that into perspective — if all of Idaho’s special education students were lumped into one district, it would be the second largest in the state, just after West Ada, which sits at 40,000 students.

But neither the state nor the federal government provides enough funding to cover the costs of all of those students and their needs. In the 2021-22 school year, the funding gap for special education sat at an estimated $66.5 million, taking into account federal and state appropriations. That leaves schools without funding for about 7,760 students.

Here’s a rundown of how special ed is funded, and how the gap is calculated

Public schools are required to fulfill the needs of every student in special education, no matter how costly it can be.

If a high-needs student moves into a district halfway through the year, and requires a full-time nurse to accompany them at school, the district must find a way to cover that cost, even if it takes up half of the annual special education budget.

And that’s how it should be, education leaders say.

“The school district cannot arbitrarily say, well, we can’t afford that,” said Cantrell. “We’re not going to do it. That’s not an option.”

Serving every child, no matter what level of ability, is public education’s purpose. Special education directors, teachers, paraprofessionals and other staff work tirelessly to ensure that students’ needs are fulfilled, even under significant funding crunches.

The state is also required to fund special education first — federal funding is a supplement to that.

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), schools are bound by a provision known as Maintenance of Effort (MOE), which requires districts and charters to (barring a few exceptions) budget the same amount of money, or more, in their special education budgets year after year.

Essentially, once money goes to special education, it stays there.

In total, districts and charters spent about $317 million on special education statewide in the 2021-22 school year.

That amount includes only the expenditures that were 100% identifiable as special education costs — in reality, special education demands likely take up even more funding, but measuring those extra costs is difficult if they aren’t identified specifically as special education expenses on budget reports.

Of the total amount, about $215 million came out of the state’s general fund — the chief operating fund for school districts and charters statewide. The state allocates that amount based on two divisors — it covers special education costs for 5-6% of students. In Idaho, the actual percentage of students who need special education services hovers around 11-12%.

For the 21-22 academic year, the K-12 general fund sat at about $2.06 billion.

But only about $148 million of that was allocated by the state for special education, leaving districts and charters on the hook for the remaining $66.5 million, according to calculations from the State Department of Education.

And that’s just state funding.

Congress never fulfilled its special education funding promise

The federal government also disperses special education money, through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

When IDEA was enacted in 1975, Congress promised that the annual appropriations would cover 40% of a state’s annual special education expenditures.

But federal funding has never risen to that promise.

Nationally, IDEA funding has hovered around 18-20% for the past 48 years, with one spike to 33% in 2009, just following the recession. In Idaho, IDEA funding has never covered more than 20% of annual special education expenditures, and it varies between school districts based on their individual overall costs.

In fiscal year 2022, districts and charters received $61 million through IDEA. That funding is part of the $317 million in total special education expenditures.

Districts can also receive reimbursements for some health-related special education expenses through school-based Medicaid, but the process is cumbersome, said Ramona Lee, special education director for the West Ada School District.

Essentially, schools pay the full amount for Medicaid-eligible services first. They then submit a reimbursement form to the federal government — that form requires schools to provide a 30% match to the approved reimbursement amount, using state or local funds, not federal.

So, before receiving any money from the government, schools are on the hook for 100% of the cost of services. Schools then receive a partial reimbursement at a net 70% from the government.

“It’s like me giving you $3 and you giving me back $10,” said Lee.

And families can refuse Medicaid reimbursement, leaving some schools on the hook for 100% of the expenses anyway.

Between the allocated state funding ($148 million) and IDEA funding ($61 million), schools had about $209 million in special education funding to work with in FY22. With another $41 million offset through Medicaid reimbursements, the total gets up to about $250 million.

But to fulfill federal and state special education requirements, which include the maintenance of effort and IDEA requirements, districts are spending at least $66.5 million more on special education than they are allocated — for a total of $317 million.

n reality, that gap is likely more extensive, considering the special education expenses that aren’t 100% identifiable. And as more students are identified with disabilities, and the state continues to operate on an antiquated funding formula, the gap is widening.

Gap exacerbates staffing, funding challenges

Funding is tight, turnover is high and resources are hard to come by. The special education funding gap only exacerbates the challenges that already prevail in schools across the state.

In many cases, districts turn to local taxpayers for funding support through supplemental levies — many of which have a budgeted amount for salaries or special education services. But it’s growing harder to pass bonds and levies, as property taxes rise and education grows more polarized.

But when the special education budget is tight, districts are forced to split up the funding pie differently in order to meet their mandate. Districts can divert funding away from other areas of education, including those that are funded through discretionary funds. Many of those shifts have a double-edged impact on special education students, Lee says.

For example, if general education class sizes are increased to pay for a special education teacher or paraprofessionals, that still impacts special education students because they are general education students. They still use general education classrooms and services, and large class sizes will have an impact on learning no matter where it happens.

“All students that receive special ed services are gen ed students first,” Lee said. “So they still need a gen ed classroom, a teacher, books, a library, a principal, lights…all those things that come with education.”

And because funding is tight, districts have a harder time meeting every student’s needs, despite educators’ best efforts.

According to Kindel Mason, director of support services for the Twin Falls School District, and president of the national Council of Administrators of Special Education, special education is the number one litigated issue in schools nationwide, and funding is a major factor.

“A lot of school districts are doing everything they can to scramble and put things in place to meet the needs of kids,” said Mason. “But I would just say, either the law is very cumbersome…or a lack of resources is causing school districts to not be able to provide everything they need to.”

Still, staffing is the biggest challenge for special education right now, agreed Lee and Mason.

With limited funding, special education case loads are high — in Twin Falls, some teachers have 30-40 students in a resource room, and 10-15 students in an extended resource room, said Mason. For many educators, that level of work isn’t sustainable.

In West Ada, the teacher shortage looks a little different.

“We don’t have a shortage of special ed certified teachers,” said Lee. “We have a shortage of special ed certified teachers who are teaching special ed. A lot of them have dual endorsements…and a lot of them move to general ed because special ed does come with a lot of work. There’s a lot of paperwork, and because the funding formula is such a challenge, case loads are typically higher than they are in a lot of other states, and that’s hard.”

Both districts — like others across the state — are also struggling to hire paraprofessionals, the classified employees who do the grunt work to support classroom teachers.

In the case of parapros, the already dismal special education funding is further compromised by a $97 million classified staff funding gap, according to a 2022 report from the Office of Performance Evaluations. The struggles that districts face in hiring parapros for general education classrooms are multiplied when hiring for special education classrooms.

“We did raise our rates by several dollars an hour, even above the general education paras to get those people in,” said Mason. “That seems to be working.”

But it comes at a cost, Mason says. When wages are raised, the district can’t hire as many people, leaving teachers without the extra hands that they need. When those hands disappear, Mason says, students lose out on critical one-on-one time with teachers, and teachers lose out on critical teaching time.

“Our biggest commodity is people doing the work,” he said.

‘The loyal para is the engine that keeps the enterprise running smoothly’ — but they’re hard to find

Amy Watts is a virtual, kindergarten through ninth grade special education teacher and advisor with the Canyon-Owyhee School Service Agency (COSSA) and Idaho Future Ready Academy. Before starting at COSSA, Watts taught special education in brick-and-mortar schools in the West Ada district, as well as Middleton. Watts says that paraprofessionals are essential to special education classrooms.

“One benefit of a special education classroom is the small class size, which allowed me to truly get to know the students,” Watts wrote to EdNews in an email. “I often had a classroom aide or other specialist in the room, so I could take time to address an individual student’s needs without worrying that such one-to-one attention was taking away from the group as a whole. This degree of personal investment and attention to the individual is crucial in a special education classroom, and it creates lifelong bonds that both the student and team find meaningful and rewarding.”

Now that she’s in an online teaching environment – a move she made in 2019 after watching her district’s elementary schools reach capacity – Watts says she doesn’t feel the pinch of the SpEd gap, but she knows it’s a real issue for many others.

“It is concerning to me that there is a demand for classified and supporting staff due to the low pay and need for better health insurance coverage,” Watts said. “Loyal paraprofessionals are hard to find, but once they are discovered, wise is the leader who values them. Special education paraprofessionals that I have worked with in the past have been rare and productive, constantly looking for ways to make the lead special education teacher successful in his or her classroom. They unselfishly serve behind the scenes, tirelessly and tediously. Because of a loyal team member’s sixth sense to anticipate needs, they know how to encourage excellence.”

“They learn to spur the lead SpEd teacher with thorough questioning and problem solving so the leader’s intuition can be clarified and verified. The loyal para is an encourager and an implementer. They get things done by converting the leader’s vision into reality. Without the skill and support of these dream enhancers, the visionary SpEd teacher would drown in their duties and functions…It is no secret that the loyal para is the engine that keeps the enterprise running smoothly.”

The students, 12- and 16-years-old at the time of the alleged incidents, said district officials failed to respond adequately to their reports — accusations they deny. In court, the students’ lawyers fought successfully for their right to stay anonymous.

“It’s completely irresponsible,” said Shiwali Patel, an attorney with the National Women’s Law Center, which supporting one of the former Fairfax student’s requests to keep her identity private. She said a lot of victims of sexual violence don’t come forward because they “don’t want to have their name out there in the public.”

The 74 reported Wednesday on the district’s release of records on an estimated 35,000 students to a parent who has been an outspoken critic of Fairfax’s data privacy record. District officials declined to comment on the specifics of the disclosures, but late Wednesday issued an apology and launched an “external legal investigation” to determine how staff released the documents.

Two weeks ago, Callie Oettinger, a special education advocate, went to her local high school to review what she thought were records she had requested on her children. But she ended up with a trove of digital files that included personal information such as addresses and disability diagnoses, and that named students who had engaged in self-harm or been hospitalized. “We are deeply sorry that this happened,” the district said, predicting the probe “could take some time” due to the large number of affected students.

In addition, Superintendent Michelle Reid responded to an email from Oettinger, saying that she had “spoken with staff and requested an immediate and thorough review into this deeply concerning matter.” 

The documents also named students with disabilities involved in a over the use of seclusion and restraint. Following a local news investigation, almost 1,700 instances involving over 200 students during the 2017-18 school year. Some students as young as six were isolated in a room dozens of times during the year. The case ended in 2021 with in which the district promised to phase out such practices by the end of last school year. Court documents only used students’ initials, but the documents released used their full names. 

“Absolutely, student names should have been protected,” said Denise Marshall, executive director of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a nonprofit that joined the parents who sued the district. She called the leak “an egregious breach of privacy.”

One of the documents on those students, labeled “attorney work product” and “privileged and confidential,” also contained the names of two former students involved in Title IX cases against the district. It identified them as “Jane Doe,” but then listed their real names in parentheses. Their last names were also included in an email from John Foster, the district’s general counsel, to board members about cases they’d discuss in a 2020 closed meeting.

In the , a plaintiff identified as Jane Doe was a 16-year-old Oakton High School student when she alleged that she was sexually assaulted during a three-day band trip in 2017. She sued in 2018, saying that officials violated Title IX because they knew about the allegations, but waited until the trip was over to address it. She alleged that the district discouraged her from contacting police and when they told her parents, suggested their daughter would face discipline for having sex while on the trip.

Doe won her case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, but it ended in a settlement last year after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the district’s appeal. She received almost $588,000 in , but the district made no admission of responsibility. The agreement includes a stipulation that the district will always redact Doe’s real name from any copy of the document and only use a pseudonym when referring to the case.

Lawyers for both students declined to comment on the recent disclosures.

The second case, , is set for trial in March in a federal district court. B.R., as she’s named in the suit, was a 12-year-old student at Rachel Carson Middle School in 2011 when she said an older group of students repeatedly raped, tortured and threatened her with death over a four-month period. She alleged that they were part of a gang tied to sex trafficking in Northern Virginia.

While she later reported the alleged attacks to the police, she said the detective who investigated was a former school resource officer in the district who quickly closed the case. The district argued that staff responded appropriately, but a by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights concluded the district could have acted more quickly. As a result, the district updated its policies.

At 19, she sued the district and her alleged attackers, saying educators ignored her requests for help. The school district argued the case should be dismissed because she missed a deadline for requesting to use a pseudonym. The in B.R.’s favor, but the district appealed to the Fourth Circuit.  

The National Women’s Law Center was one of 52 organizations that argued the case should continue, despite what it called a “procedural technicality.” In November 2021, the ruled in favor of the plaintiff. 

“In many of these cases, plaintiffs are proceeding with a pseudonym. That is not uncommon,” Patel said. “For the district to push back against that is a bullying tactic. It doesn’t impact their ability to defend the lawsuit.”

The documents identify current and former special education students by name and include letter grades, disability status and mental health data. In one particularly sensitive disclosure, a counselor identified over 60 students who’ve struggled with issues like depression, including those who have engaged in self-harm or been hospitalized. 

A letter from the district to the state provides copious details about the condition and care of a medically fragile fourth grader. And a document containing “attorney work product” marked “privileged and confidential” references a pair of Title IX cases. It identifies two students as “Jane Doe” — a common practice with alleged victims of sexual assault or harassment — but then names the students in parentheses.

The disclosure of private student data is likely the largest since 2020, when the hacker group MAZE , including Social Security numbers and birthdates, on over 170,000 students and employees in the nation’s 13th-largest district. But this time, it looks like human error, rather than ransomware, was to blame. 

“Why worry about people from the outside?” asked Callie Oettinger, who received the recent document collection. “They’ve got the door wide open from the inside.”  

Oettinger, a parent and special education advocate with a long and contentious relationship with Fairfax administrators, went to a school on three consecutive days last month to examine her children’s files — data such as test scores, attendance records and audio recordings of meetings she’s been requesting for years. In addition to boxes of paper files, the district provided her with thumb drives and computer discs that Oettinger estimates include personal data on roughly 35,000 students.

Parents who have challenged the district over special education services said the leak opens their children to further harm. Among the records released to Oettinger was a 2019 email exchange in which officials questioned the cost of an independent educational evaluation for Julie Melear’s son, who has dyslexia. 

“Is my kid, for the rest of his life, going to have to look over his shoulder to see what Fairfax is putting out there?” asked Melear, who had three children in the district and now lives in Denver.

The latest disclosure is not an isolated incident. Oettinger, who also runs a special education , said the district has repeatedly released information on her now 19-year-old son to other parents and unauthorized staff and, on at least six occasions between 2016 and 2021, provided her with documents on children who are not her own. One was a 2020 internal on special education that included students’ names, their attorneys and costs for services.

But those instances seem small compared to the volume of records she received in October, which span the years 2019 to 2021. It also comes four years after the district’s former superintendent apologized to Oettinger for a similar disclosure and two years after a county judge ruled against Fairfax in a case related to leaked student records. 

Contacted last week, Fairfax officials — who pledged to improve security after the 2020 breach — appeared unaware they had given Oettinger access to students’ personal data. The district’s communications office forwarded an inquiry from The 74 to Molly Shannon, who manages the district’s public records office. In an email, Shannon asked a reporter to identify who accessed the records and where it occurred ”so we can investigate and remediate the issue at the school, notify any affected families, and work with the parent to ensure other students’ information is properly secured.” 

Under , the district is required to alert parents “as soon as practicable” if there’s a violation under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.

The records release is the latest dilemma for Virginia’s largest school system, which has come under intense scrutiny for its handling of special education. Following a federal civil rights probe last year, to make up for services it failed to provide to students with disabilities during the pandemic. For years, federal officials the state to improve its monitoring of districts to ensure they’re complying with all special education laws. As recently as February, they told former state Superintendent Jillian Balow that remained a sticking point.

Data leaks linked to are not unique to Fairfax. In 2017, for example, the Chicago Public Schools posted , including health conditions and birthdates, to unsecured websites. Time-consuming records requests to school districts have also skyrocketed in recent years, fueled in part by controversies over COVID protocols, library books and curriculum. Many districts have struggled to keep up, but one expert said Fairfax shouldn’t be one of them.

“I have a lot more sympathy for the many, many small districts,” said Amelia Vance, founder and president of the Public Interest Privacy Center. But with an annual $3.5 billion budget, Fairfax, she said, “certainly seems to have the resources and they’ve had these requests for years. If they don’t have a system to respond in a protective manner, in an efficient manner, that’s on them.”

Phyllis Wolfram, executive director of the Council of Administrators of Special Education, a national organization, said she doesn’t think it’s common for districts to release students’ files to the wrong parent. But if record requests are increasing, she said, security should be tighter. 

“Given the shortage of school staff all around, we must be extra vigilant and ensure high-quality training for all staff,” she said. 

‘Process and protocols’ 

FERPA is that gives parents the right to examine their children’s educational records. Oettinger said she asked to see original documents in person — after the state overruled the district’s initial refusal — because past responses have been incomplete or contained electronic files that didn’t open. 

She said she is unsure who in the district ultimately signed off on the recent release. On Oct. 16th, she received an email from Shannon saying the records were ready. From Oct. 17 to 19, she sat in a small room next to the main office of her local high school and viewed the files. A paralegal from the central office supervised as she copied records to thumb drives and scanned paper documents on her phone, Oettinger said. He offered assistance and even called in an IT expert when a media file didn’t open. She recorded everything and shared audio files of her visit with The 74. Ironically, she said, some of her own children’s records are still missing.

At one point, she spotted an unredacted document with a teacher’s notes and suspected there were more. But she said she didn’t realize the full scope of the disclosure until she began reviewing the files at home. 

She filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on Oct. 20 and contacted a handful of parents she knows with children named in the documents.

Oettinger said she didn’t report the leak to district officials because she doesn’t trust them — a skepticism that has only intensified over time. When her son had reading difficulties in elementary school, educators responded three times that an evaluation “is not warranted,” according to district records and, she said, told her that boys learn to read slower than girls. 

“You get one chance with your kid, and there’s no handbook,” she said. “In special education especially, nobody knows what to do. All you know is that you’re fighting.”

It took an independent evaluation for her son to be diagnosed with dyslexia, and by seventh grade, he had an Individualized Education Program, a plan that outlines the services a district is obligated to provide students with disabilities. Like thousands of Fairfax parents, she also complained that the district failed to follow that plan during the pandemic. He graduated in 2022, but her daughter remains a Fairfax student.

As she navigated the system for her son, she became a sounding board for other families. She launched her website, Special Education Action, in 2020. She’s filed at least 100 complaints with the state education department over special education services in the district and another dozen with the federal civil rights office, of which at least two have resulted in investigations. Her persistence — sending detailed, sometimes biting, emails and pressing for answers to all her questions — has earned her a reputation for “berating” staff, according to one 2019 email from Dawn Schaefer, director of the district office that handles special education complaints.

“It’s obvious you don’t know what you’re talking about, so let me break it down for you,” Oettinger wrote in a 2020 email to a staff person regarding a diagnosis for her son.

In addition to requests for documents on her own children, she submits Freedom of Information Act requests with the district each year for more general data that she uses in her advocacy role. In one internal 2020 email she obtained, John Cafferky, an attorney who handles special education cases for the district, said she files them because she’s “waiting for someone to slip up.” 

District officials have promised her they would do a better job of safeguarding student privacy. In a 2019 email exchange with former Superintendent Scott Brabrand, Oettinger reported multiple cases of school staff forwarding information about her son to the wrong people. 

“I am sorry to report that the school did make a mistake and unintentionally provided information about your son to another parent,” he responded. “We take student privacy very seriously. Following our process and protocols is paramount to ensuring we protect student information.”

Following the 2020 ransomware incident, the district and released a statement saying it was “committed to protecting the information of our students, our staff, and their families.” The state also stepped in to help the district clean up its “internal practices, and ensure it should not happen again,” state Superintendent Lisa Coons told The 74.

But it did. 

In 2021, another Fairfax parent, Debra Tisler, filed a public records request seeking invoices for legal services in an attempt to learn how much Fairfax was spending on attorneys’ fees related to students with disabilities. The district released records that included personal information on about a dozen students. 

Tisler shared the files with Oettinger, who posted , with names blacked out, on her website. The district to get the records back, but lost the case. 

Judge Richard Gardiner, who heard the lawsuit in a Fairfax County district court, said the records were “obtained quite lawfully.” 

“The [district], for whatever reason — maybe it was ineptness, I don’t know; I have no evidence on that — made the decision to turn over the information, and they’re stuck with that,” he said, according to of the hearing. 

Following the lawsuit, an from December 2022 showed the district’s in-house attorneys didn’t finish redacting students’ personal information before its records office released the documents. Fairfax instituted new procedures to ensure records go through multiple reviews, including checks by a paralegal and a staff attorney. The district also to keep up with demand.

‘Basic data protection’

But it appears the system broke down. Some parents whose records ended up in the recently released files said they weren’t surprised because they, too, have previously received documents pertaining to other students.

“Some of the information I found out about other people’s children I don’t want to know,” said Melear, the parent who relocated to Denver. 

In the files released to Oettinger, Torey Vanek’s daughter was included on a spreadsheet of students who receive special education services or accommodations for a disability. A ninth grader at Woodson High School, her daughter has dyslexia. 

 “There is a joint frustration among many parents in Fairfax,” Vanek said. “Part of me is not surprised, but part of me is like this is just basic data protection.” 

The reported late last month there was a 78% increase in multilingual students for the 2023-24 academic year compared to the last two years.

“From 2020 to 2023, the District has witnessed a staggering 78% surge in the Multilingual Learner population,” according to a press release.

District spokeswoman Nancy Deering told The 74 the majority of new multilingual students come from Spanish speaking countries.

District officials would not say if the influx of multilingual students come from migrant families, but immigration cases have increased in the . 

And reported in the last year it has doubled the number of families they have helped, with about half migrating from Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico and Chile.  

In the 2022-23 academic year, there were more than , with 9,000 multilingual students and 6,000 — about 24% and 15% respectively.

With a 78% surge, the previous 9,000 multilingual students comes to more than 16,000 for the 2023-24 academic year, with Latino students comprising the majority of the district’s enrollment. 

In the 2022-23 academic year, there were nearly 23,000 Latino students, about 55% of the student population — compared to 36% of Black students and 7% of white students, according to the .

Newark superintendent Roger León told The 74 the district hired close to 1,000 teachers in the past two academic years but currently has 80 vacancies mostly for multilingual and special needs teachers. 

English Language Learners

León said educators must be certified to teach multilingual students, slowing down the hiring process.

To ease these staffing shortages, León said the district has created incentives for current teachers to get the certification.

“We have a pool of staff members that are in route to get the endorsement and once they’re done that’ll be how we solve our problem,” said León.

Neither León nor Deering would elaborate on what the incentives were. 

The district also held its in August for more than 250 teachers to help English language learners pass an English proficiency test and transition out of needing multilingual services.

Special Education

One parent said staffing issues in the district has prevented her two high school children with special needs from fully thriving, oftentimes needing occupational therapy among other services that aren’t always available.

“I just see the district harboring kids on the spectrum from high functioning to low functioning all in the same classroom which is not a good idea,” she told The 74 anonymously to protect the identity of her children. “My kids have a different level of learning and they need to be with that particular group.”

Another parent added how staffing problems prevented her 6th grade son from attending a specialized district school. 

“It’s been issue after issue after issue,” she told The 74 anonymously to protect the identity of her son. “Every single thing, all the support I’ve been advocating for, has been a fight.”

León believes the district wouldn’t have to worry about finding special education teachers if Newark’s charter schools didn’t contribute to the problem.

“Students that have an IEP are not afforded an opportunity to have an education in Newark charter schools because they get kicked out,” said León. “So if we want to help solve this problem, the charter schools need to get it together.”

The Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) failed to investigate a significant number of formal complaints against schools not following federal laws to protect students with disabilities during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor.

Auditors found state education officials investigated and resolved 61 complaints during the 2021-2022 school year but failed to properly address 42 others it received through its dispute resolution email. The department responded to nine of the emails but ignored 13 and couldn’t provide evidence of how they responded to 20 others.

Education officials refused to address the allegations in those 42 emails because the parents didn’t provide a signature along with their allegations, according to the audit.

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Federal regulations require formal complaints to be made in writing and signed. But the state should have at least responded to the emails with an explanation of why it couldn’t review the allegations, the auditors noted.

Some of the allegations were potentially credible. The audit noted they “were similar to other allegations that were accepted by LDOE.”

“By not adequately responding to all allegations, the LDOE may cause parents to lose faith in the complaint process and fail to submit additional complaints in the future,” the audit said.

There are more than 89,000 students with disabilities receiving special education services out of 685,606 total K-12 students in Louisiana public schools. Of the 61 complaints investigated, the Department of Education substantiated only seven with findings against the school system. It dismissed 17 complaints outright, and it investigated but found no violations in 16 others. The remaining 21 complaints were withdrawn by the complainants.

Auditors recommended the department make its complaint process more accessible and transparent. This would include receiving complaints by phone, ensuring parents are routed to appropriate resources, providing dispute resolution forms in languages other than English, and contacting the complainant during the formal complaint investigation.

Of the 17 complaints state education officials dismissed without investigating, roughly half were dismissed for insufficient or incomplete information.

The department should increase its outreach to parents and give parents the opportunity to submit missing information before simply dismissing the complaint, the audit suggested.

The Louisiana Department of Education accepts formal and informal complaints. Informal complaints can include the same allegations as formal complaints but do not need to be in writing, signed or include the parent’s contact information or specific facts that prove a school violated the law.

When a parent submits an informal complaint, the state is supposed to forward it to the particular school system and monitor the process to help both sides reach a resolution. If no agreement is reached, the parent has additional options such as mediation or the formal complaint process.

If noncompliance is found following a formal complaint, the education department should try to find out if similarly situated students might be affected across a school system, according to the audit. To do this, the department should review other formal and informal complaints in an effort to identify any patterns of noncompliance, but “LDOE does not sufficiently track enough complaint information to be used to identify trends of noncompliance.”

In a written response to the audit, Meredith Jordan, executive director of LDOE’s Diverse Learners, said the department agreed with all of the audit’s findings and has begun to implement improvements. The agency has created the state’s first special education ombudsman position and created an additional complaint investigator position, she added.

“This will give parents greater access to someone to help them navigate their concerns and also more effectively review parent grievances,” Jordan wrote.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on and .

It’s been almost a year since Megan Weber’s son received the special education support he needs. For a 3-year-old, that’s a significant chunk of development time.

Weber’s son was diagnosed with autism just before his 3rd birthday. He is required by law to receive roughly four hours of support per week from a special education teacher, plus periodic support from a speech pathologist.

“He has to make a connection (with someone), and he has difficulty regulating his emotions,” Weber told the Maine Morning Star. “If he’s not connected to the person who’s coming in to see him once or twice a week, it’s harder for them to steer him if he’s having a breakdown.”

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Weber, a supply chain manager who lives in North Waterboro, has been “back and forth for a little less than a year” with the state, but has largely come up empty in efforts to find service providers who can help her son.

‘And then…nothing happened’

Students in public school programs who require special education services are legally required to receive them under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a federal law. To receive that assistance, those children’s families work with a child psychologist to draft an Individualized Education Plan, or IEP, a formal document managed by the state’s Department of Education.

It’s up to Child Development Services (CDS), a branch of the state Department of Education, to find service providers who can meet the needs of the IEP, which can span special education, occupational therapy, speech therapy and other needs.

But since the pandemic, children have not been getting the developmental educational services that they are required to be given by the state of Maine, according to Beth Gachowski.

Gachowski owns and operates Arundel Children’s Garden, an early childhood program in Kennebunkport that has capacity for 24 kids—including Weber’s son.

Weber’s son and another 3-year-old child have been in her program since they were babies. As they developed, Gachowski and the children’s parents noticed that there were developmental differences, which turned out to be autism. She directed the families to Child Development Services to hash out the details of the IEP.

“And then…nothing happened,” Gachowski said.

Gachowski has a masters in Early Childhood Education, and has worked as an educator or daycare provider for 30 years. She moved to Maine in 2001, and opened Arundel Children’s Garden in 2019. She knows the drill—helping families out with their IEPs is part of the process, and there’s always some lag time with receiving services because of the process and paperwork involved. But since the pandemic, that process can now take years.

“A year in the life of a 3-year-old is a lot of developmental time,” Gachowski said. “It has a huge impact on these children and their ability.”

A staffer from the regional Child Development Services office in Arundel said they were not authorized to comment. The state director did not return an email or phone call Monday.

Gachowski doesn’t want to disparage Child Development Services. She believes they genuinely can’t find people to do the work. Gachowski spoke with her local legislator about the issue, but they did not respond by publication.

“I’m just trying to highlight that this is a very serious problem,” she said. “They say they don’t have providers, they don’t have speech pathologists, they don’t have occupational therapists—I’m sure that’s true. And I don’t really have the answers.”

But Gachowski is positioned to witness the strain the issue puts on families with children with special education needs. In Weber’s son’s case, the special education teacher that was assigned to him by CDS was unavailable to go see him.

“He was barely getting maybe a half hour a week,” Weber said. The speech pathologist they’d hired went on maternity leave, and then support providers went on break during the summer. For Weber, it was maddening to watch her kid not get the services he needed.

“He’s at that early intervention stage,” she said. With the right support, “he can thrive.”

After months of waiting, Weber decided “enough was enough.” She pestered Child Development Services, sending a “stern email” demanding they revisit the case. With the agency’s help, they arranged a program to repurpose a teacher from Gachowski’s daycare as an education tech, paying them as a special education teacher.

It was a useful fix, but not a sustainable one.

“We burnt out a teacher, and it’s already very hard to find early education teachers,” Gachowski said.

According to Weber, Child Development Services was very apologetic and sympathetic to her cause. While the situation is an urgent one for her and her family, she recognizes that the problem is bigger.

The process of diagnosing and getting Weber’s son his IEP was “smooth,” she said. The family worked with CDS and a child psychologist to craft the plan, and found the process to be exactly what he needed.

“If they’d actually had the resources to implement that plan, that would have been great,” Weber said.

It was after his IEP was fully written that they saw a struggle with resources.

“The resources weren’t lacking in regards to getting the diagnosis or writing the IEP itself, but the actual people that were implementing the services,” Weber said.

Circumventing the wait list

Better times are ahead for Weber’s son. He was just placed in a special education focused preschool this month. Though getting him there will require Weber and her husband, a welder, to rearrange their work schedules, she feels a lot better.

“It took a long time,” she said. “It was so hard to get into this special education preschool because of the waiting list.”

While many industries have faced staffing issues, Gachowski believes that the issue has been exacerbated by families who circumvent the state program, paying privately for service providers, making it harder for Child Development Services to find personnel.

“We are in Kennebunkport,” Gachowski says of the wealthy coastal Maine town. “Some of the kids who have gotten services have gotten them because the parents went out and found them and paid for them independently, which is not supposed to be what happens. People aren’t choosing to have a contract with Child Development Services in a way that providers used to.”

Working with Weber to try to find support for her son makes Gachowski wonder what other parents might be struggling with the same issue, in less resourced parts of the state.

“Those two moms are working moms who have spent an exorbitant amount of time trying to get their kids what they need,” Gachowski said. “Not every kid has that mom. What’s happening to those kids who don’t have that mom?”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com. Follow Maine Morning Star on and .

LINCOLN — About one week before school started this fall, Omaha Public Schools informed Kelsey Escobar her child would need to change schools to continue his individualized special education. She could choose among a dozen different sites.

Escobar said her son transferred into one of those sites, but the afternoon school bus that was arranged to pick up her son did not arrive multiple times during the first week of school, and school administrators didn’t tell her about a change in plans until 4:30 or 5 p.m. She said that no one from the OPS central office told her in advance and that it felt like OPS was trying to “bully” her family into selecting another school.

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Though the situation has since improved, Escobar told the Nebraska Legislature’s Education Committee on Friday the experience traumatized her and scared her son for being left behind.

“It was very stressful for me,” Escobar told the committee. “It was something that I didn’t think I would ever have to go through because, obviously, it’s the school system, they know what they’re doing. Our kids are in their hands pretty much.”

“I always have my phone next to me just in case the school tells me, ‘Hey, the bus is not coming today,’” Escobar added.

Vacancies pushed students from three schools

The Education Committee called for Friday’s special briefing after — Walnut Hill, King and Central Park — were left without a single special education instructor this year.

Spencer Head, president of the Omaha School Board, said the five vacancies at those schools are the result of four resignations and one transfer in the spring. The vacancies are just a handful of 133 special education teachers missing in OPS classrooms.

Across the three North Omaha schools, 137 students have been displaced or are going without services if they chose not to relocate.

OPS, Head said, has 52,000 students. Roughly 21.3% of them are on an individual education plan, or IEP — the national average is 15% of students. OPS’s share of special needs students is greater than the number of total students in all but five of the state’s 244 districts, Head said.

IEP teams can include five to 15 support staff members and are crafted delicately according to state and federal laws after meetings usually lasting one to five hours.

“It’s a complicated process with one primary goal: to ensure that students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate education,” Head testified.

The process has also gone through “lawyerfication” with 330 families now coming to IEP meetings with lawyers who treat the process as “mini-trials,” according to Head. Five years ago, the district averaged five cases of families who were represented by lawyers, Head said, and the increases are because juvenile courts have appointed legal counsel for families in unrelated cases.

“It’s a process that really makes no sense,” Head said. “IEPs are meant to be collaborative rather than combative endeavors.”

‘What are we doing?’

Lawmakers at the hearing often traded grilling questions to Head as well as to Charles Wakefield, OPS’s chief operations and talent officer, and Kara Saldierna, executive director of special education for OPS.

At times, lawmakers scrunched their faces or used their hands to hide their faces or hold their noses after asking OPS officials what steps they took to minimize the fallout and communicate with families.

At one point, the room fell silent after Omaha State Sen. Justin Wayne, who represents North Omaha alongside State Sen. Terrell McKinney, asked, “What are we doing?”

No OPS official had a response.

State Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln asked whether OPS had taken other steps, such as negotiating with the local teachers union, communicating with the Nebraska Department of Education or using emergency funds to address the vacancies. Wayne asked whether the district considered contracting with private companies to provide certain services.

Wakefield said OPS last negotiated teacher contracts in the winter but has not done so recently because teachers would breach their contracts and risk losing their licenses if they left their current districts to come to OPS.

Why these schools?

Conrad asked the officials, “Is this an emergency?” and Head nodded, “Yep,” and explained the district is now looking at using reserves in some way. Head said the district is also in contact with the Nebraska Department of Education.

OPS board members approved the district’s next budget, which Wayne noted includes fewer funds for the North Omaha schools that no longer offer certain special education services.

Saldierna said that the intent is to restaff the schools and that OPS will not require students who have transferred to return to their schools unless they want to.

OPS is also shifting  for speech language pathology to online services through the Chicago-based TeleTeachers. An in-person staff will monitor students.

State Sen. Lou Ann Linehan of Elkhorn asked why the issue fell on the three North Omaha schools, which Saldierna said was not OPS’s choice.

“What we did have control over was to ensure that students at those schools were able to receive special education services,” Saldierna added.

Head said Matthew Ray, OPS interim superintendent, made the final call to move the North Omaha families. Doing so was meant to avoid a “ripple effect” impacting more students if the district took an alternate route, Head said.

‘We scavenge wherever we can’

Conrad asked why the changes seemed sudden in mid-August when families were first notified, considering the district knew about the vacancies in April.

Wakefield said OPS had every intent to fill the positions, working to recruit year-round, attending multiple career fairs, visiting 20 different states and advertising through billboards in districts miles away to “steal” teachers.

Still, the vacancies — similar to districts nationwide — persisted.

“We scavenge wherever we can, but no matter how much money we actually contract … we’ve got to have the people to do it,” Wakefield said, stating no teachers are available.

OPS officials said the district would be in further trouble if a teacher suddenly resigned or was injured. Wayne asked repeatedly what the contingency plan was and expressed concern for liability in the district.

Legislature mulls more legislation

Solving the shortage of special education teachers is a little more complicated than a shortage of general education teachers because there is a licensing requirement. There are current teachers certified in special education, but Wakefield said they’ve not been approached because of a similarly feared “ripple effect” for those students.

Head suggested possible changes could include changing a licensure requirement so it could be fulfilled through a Nebraska Department of Education course or allowing teaching certification tests to substitute additional education and get teachers in the classroom sooner.

Conrad said there has to be a price point to incentivize teachers. She said she hopes OPS and other districts facing similar circumstances will use the moment to come up with a clear plan so the Legislature can further address teacher retention and recruitment.

This year, the Education Committee eliminated certain certification fees and budgeted stipends to retain teachers as two ways of addressing the issues with legislation led by State Sens. Lynne Walz of Fremont and Linehan, respectively.

‘We are exploiting their altruism’

Elizabeth Eynon-Kokrda, managing attorney for Education Rights Counsel, which provides support to under-resourced public pre-K-12 students, said the Legislature could choose to address student-to-teacher ratios, resolve transportation concerns or require more accountability.

“Some children, you can give them those tools and they don’t use them,” Eynon-Kokrda said. “But the vast majority of students that we work with, when they get those tools, they start succeeding.”

She added it’s hard to understand why no teachers were removed from schools that, unlike in North Omaha, do not have a majority of students of color or families living in poverty.

Edison McDonald, executive director of The Arc of Nebraska, which advocates with and for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, thanked the Legislature for this year’s investments in special education. However, he said, more support will soon be needed.

Conrad said the situation raises racial and gender justice issues and has another complexity: a history of society and the state not valuing teachers.

“We’re not paying them for the professionals that they are,” Conrad said. “And we are exploiting their altruism and dedication because they are passionate about teaching and kids in education, paying them salaries that don’t let them buy a house or live in any sort of peace of mind.”

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Once school or other development programs end, so much is gone all at once — structured days, weeks and years; regular social interaction with peers; non-parental authority figures; speech, occupational and physical therapy; and, critically, the sense that the young adult has a place that belongs to them outside their family. We designed the community to provide some of the components of what was no longer available, with scheduled voluntary activities, support from staff social workers, a 24/7 emergency phone line and, most important, peers with whom they could build independent lives. 

We chose White Plains because it is a small city with a range of housing in a central core, robust public transportation, and a lively retail and business environment that provides opportunities for work, recreation and shopping — all accessible on foot or by bus/train. We partnered with two nonsectarian human services agencies to manage the operation and growth of the community. 

We began with 15 members, some local and others whose families were as far away as California and Kentucky. The community now has more than 55 members, with close to a 50:50 ratio of men and women, representing 10 states.

POINT members live in apartment buildings across White Plains, some with roommates and others alone. Families pay for the POINT program fee, housing, food, etc., supplemented by members’ earnings and federal and local programs including SSI/SSD. All participants are expected to work, do internships, go to school and/or attend day programs. There are planned social activities, and members can create their own. There is a “clubhouse” space for classes, parties, movie nights, etc., within walking distance of the apartments.

We see our son living a life that is far beyond anything we could have envisioned for him when he was a child. He is independent, he works, he manages his calendar, he seeks appropriate recreation and entertainment, and he is a member of a small, comfortable community that interacts with the broader neighborhood. 

How did a third grader with limited social skills, significant learning disabilities and very little interest in doing things for himself get here? Here are some key lessons that we learned:

• Maximize independence whenever possible: Early on, we heard the expression “the dignity of risk.” Overprotecting special-needs kids, while a natural inclination, will limit their abilities and possibilities more than doing so with a neurotypical child. For example, we sent our son to camp from ages 9 to 17, first for one week, then for four, and then for the full summer. He loved being with peers and counselors, and began developing leadership skills while figuring things out without mom and dad hovering. To see our son embrace his independence today is wonderful payback for all those situations when our hearts were in our mouths as he set off on adventures for which he was only marginally ready.
  
• Be flexible: No one answer is right for everyone, or for every time. In elementary and middle school, we placed our son in an inclusion setting, in classes with both neurotypical and learning-disabled students. This provided an environment that had a range of academic achievement and staff to meet students where they were and help them grow. But when it came to high school, we reversed course and placed him at a boarding school for youngsters with special needs. We were able to partially defray the cost with funding from New York State. In this environment, Alex learned some independent living skills, like managing his laundry, organizing his belongings and getting where he needed to be without us overseeing every action he took. At each transition, we evaluated our options and found what was best for him and for at that time. At several points, the correct program didn’t exist — so we joined forces with other parents and created it.
  
• Find professionals with the vision, expertise and flexibility to help your child grow: For Alex, these included an elementary school principal who focused on his potential rather than his deficits; a camp director who pushed all kids to explore their interests and challenge themselves in athletics, performing arts and socialization; and human services agencies committed to building an enviable life for individuals with social and cognitive challenges.
  
• Collect other families: More than once, it took the power of the group to form programs or nudge them in a more positive direction — things individual parents could not accomplish on their own. Just as developmentally disabled children and adults need a community of peers, so, too, do their families. From Alex’s camp and schools, we formed friendships with other parents who became the core of what it took to create POINT.
  
• Stay involved: After high school, we chose a postsecondary residential program to build Alex’s vocational skills, social network and independence (although, frequently, independent skills were left on the doorstep when he returned home for visits). Being active in schools, and supporting them through fundraising and advocacy, created a partnership with school leaders that allowed us a voice in how Alex could best be served. Now that he is part of the POINT Community, we continue the same supports with the organizations that are administering the program. We are seen as partners, not just consumers.
  
• Enjoy the successes: It’s easy to focus on gaps and shortcomings. We’ve learned to take great pleasure in seeing our son blossom into a self-assured young man who has found a comfortable place in the world.  He is productive, has friends and enjoys his interactions both inside and outside the group. Some steps were small and some were huge, such as traveling by mass transit and flying cross-country alone. Some went backward. But we have much to be thankful for.

In Virginia, state education officials could be partly to blame.

The federal government whether the Virginia Department of Education misled school districts about their responsibility to serve students with disabilities during school closures. The probe focuses on whether the department allowed districts to deliver services that “fell short” of the free and appropriate education required under federal law. 

At the time, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos districts still had to serve students with disabilities despite the shutdown. But Virginia’s  during that period said officials should “acknowledge service delivery limitations” and then make “reasonable efforts” to follow a student’s special education plan — known as an individualized education program —once schools reopened.

Districts across the state released documents saying that some services would be “functionally unavailable” because students were learning remotely and that educators would do their best to serve students online and by phone. 

The state education department “provided cover to the school systems for whatever type of … remote learning or virtual instruction” they provided, alleged Reade Bush, an Arlington, Virginia, father and part of the coalition of parents that asked the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to investigate. “There was no attempt to make it compliant for students who could not engage in virtual learning.”

Virginia is the third state OCR has investigated for its handling of special education services during the pandemic. OCR dropped its investigation in Indiana in June, 2021, saying that it had no evidence the state was denying services to children with disabilities. Another investigation is ongoing.

The Department of Education all states last month of their responsibility to ensure districts follow the law and suggested that some need to tighten supervision. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for at least two years, and six states, including Virginia, didn’t meet expectations this year, according to the department.

Advocates welcomed the department’s guidance. Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a nonprofit focusing on students with disabilities, said monitoring “has been sorely lacking at all levels,” but added that even when states make improvements, federal officials should take “meaningful action” when needed. 

‘The system is just horrible’

The federal inquiry in Virginia is the latest challenge facing the state for its oversight of services for students with disabilities. Fairfax County parents and the state agency last fall, stating that “school-friendly” hearing officers who review parents’ complaints overwhelmingly rule against families. A federal district court last month, but the plaintiffs plan to appeal to the U.S Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The state’s failure to hold districts accountable is a long-standing problem that , according to special education advocates. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who made parent empowerment a centerpiece of his campaign, has special education, but some state board members remain frustrated.

“The system is just horrible in every which way … anti-family, pro-lawyer, pro-litigation,” Board Member Bill Hansen said during .

Virginia has had three education chiefs since the beginning of the pandemic. James Lane, the superintendent when COVID hit, is now an acting assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education. In that role, he recused himself from Virginia education matters and OCR hasn’t discussed the investigation with him, according to the department.

Youngkin appointed Jillian Balow to replace him. She served a little over a year before resigning in March. When she stepped down, she told The 74 that special education “is the most complex work that goes on in a state agency,” but declined to make additional comments because of the lawsuit. 

Now Lisa Coons, former chief academic officer in Tennessee, is in charge. She also declined to comment on the OCR investigation, but told the board during the June meeting that she’s making changes, such as opening a parent engagement office and taking more authority over special education.

Michael Adamson, an attorney representing the family in the lawsuit against Fairfax schools and the state, said “lack of oversight … results in a kind of Wild West” and “really bad behavior” at the district level. 

‘Better off in Haiti’

The state told a Fairfax County parent in March, 2021, that it wouldn’t override a district’s decision to only offer remote learning and that district leaders were “best positioned” to determine services. By that point, federal civil rights officials were the district’s failure to provide them. 

Now Fairfax, in an agreement with OCR, must implement an to offer compensatory education — the term for make-up services districts owe students when they fail to provide them in the first place. The district wouldn’t comment on the state’s guidance.

Bush and his wife, who adopted two children from Haiti in 2013, had a similar experience. His 11-year-old son, who is autistic, was among the first students that the Arlington Public Schools allowed to return to school in January of 2021. But he spent his days on an iPad, learning from an aide in another room, despite a doctor’s recommendations that he needed to interact with other children. The Arlington district did not respond to a request for comment.

Bush’s son lost reading skills, made up imaginary friends after months of isolation and, like some children with autism, began incessantly “scripting” — repeating lines from movies or TV shows.��In his son’s case, it was play-by-play commentary from football games. He did hundreds of cartwheels a day and lost motivation for learning and wrestling, a sport in which he had excelled.

“He really nosedived. We’re still trying to get him back,” Bush said. “My son would be better off in Haiti of all places. They kept .”

Bush and other parents continued to face opposition when asking districts for compensatory education.

His son received six and a half hours of reading support in 2021, and another 25 hours in 2022 after he showed Arlington officials test data and samples of his son’s work. Now entering sixth grade, he’s two years behind in reading.

In rural Page County, Jordan Choe’s two children, 9 and 7, have autism, ADHD and dyslexia. 

During the 2021-22 school year, Choe chose to keep the children in the Page district’s optional virtual learning program. The students had access to Edgenuity, an online learning platform, but no special education services. 

He complained to the state, which said in a letter to the family that remote learning “was never designed” to comply with special education law.��

The family eventually hired a private tutor. 

“We lived on mac and cheese and hot dogs to be able to pay for this,” Choe said.��

‘Not unique’

Special education advocates say Virginia waited too long to heed the federal government’s warnings. But families in the state certainly aren’t the only ones still seeking compensatory education

“What is happening in Virginia is not unique,” said Diana Heldfond, founder and CEO of Parallel Learning, a company that provides virtual assessment, therapy and instruction for districts, including some in Virginia. 

She partly attributed the breakdown of special education during the pandemic to underfunding.The law says federal funds should cover 40% of the cost of education for students with disabilities, but in reality it’s . 

Students and teachers pay the price, said Anne Holton, another Virginia state board member.

“I have seen … teachers [with] …essentially no training at all dealing with some of our children with the toughest needs,” she said during the June meeting. “It’s no surprise at all to me that … everybody is frustrated, including the teacher.”

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and a member of The 74’s Board of Directors.

But while things have improved, they’re far from perfect. It’s 2023, and we’ve heard versions of this sentence far too often from administrators across the country: “All our test scores are great, except for the students with disabilities.” The casualness with which this statement is made is both astounding and insulting — and unfortunately, backed up by data: When the pandemic hit, polls in revealed that only about a quarter of schools reported providing instructional services for students with disabilities. What’s more, advocacy groups representing lobbied to waive the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (which requires schools to provide special education) when classes went remote, implicitly signaling that teaching students with disabilities was not a priority.

Why are we as a society accepting failure for an entire group of students?

Students with ADHD, dyslexia or any other disabilities are not destined to fail. In fact, a study from the found that 80% to 85% of children who qualify for special education can achieve the same results as their neurotypical peers if given the right instruction and accommodations. So why isn’t this happening? The cause behind the acceptance of subpar success rates for neurodiverse students is an ableist culture that still influences schools’ educators and administrators.

What if a teacher asked you to take your glasses off at the beginning of class? It would seem like an outrageous request. Yet that is precisely the attitude with which neurodiverse students are treated. Until a investigation exposed the truth in 2016, for 12 years, the Texas Education Agency had imposed an , discouraging schools from having more than 8.5% of students eligible for services. This resulted in thousands of children being deprived of help they needed. The national average at the time was 12%.

Just this year, lawmakers in Oklahoma that would have allowed corporal punishment explicitly for students with disabilities. And one of us recently visited a school in northern California where kids were barred from recess until they memorized certain words. After years of isolation brought on by the pandemic, the last thing a school should do is tie socialization to memorization of words, which can be extraordinarily difficult for students with learning disabilities.

Such ableist practices in schools don’t exist in a vacuum: They represent an entire society that sees disability as a sign of weakness, stupidity or, worse, something generating pity. Just recently, one of us received an email that ended by apologizing for the long message because, “I know you’re a poor reader.” The writer meant well, but the idea that having dyslexia makes people poor readers paints them as incapable of reading a simple email — as if we haven’t read hundreds of them before. We can’t tell you the number of times we have both been commended for doing such important work for “those” kids. Society is entirely too comfortable othering and perpetuating low expectations for students who are neurodiverse. 

Creating an education system where all students are set up for success means rejecting the plague of ableism. Thankfully, work is being done to make a difference. The nonprofit has chapters in 23 states that match middle schoolers with high school- and college-level mentors with similar neurodiverse identities to show them there is a pathway to success. Eye to Eye also trains teachers to support neurodiverse students’ learning needs. The advocates to ensure that students with disabilities can readily access charter schools and works with local partners in urban districts such as Camden, New Jersey; Denver; New Orleans, and Newark to eliminate systemic barriers. There is also far more neurodiverse representation in popular culture, such as the long-running and the new ABC show Will Trent, than there used to be.

Our organizations work to create a culture of understanding in public education, but ultimately, change must come from the top. That’s why students who learn differently to advocate for changes that will make learning more equitable. Last year, they succeeded in convincing legislators of the importance of , which would let students transfer their accommodations from high school to college without having to reapply. Unfortunately, Congress has not passed that bill, and while lawmakers have , it still does not have the full support for special education envisioned when it was introduced in 1975.

When leaders in D.C. and schools take disabilities as seriously as parents and their children do, educators can create an environment where one child’s failure cannot be shrugged off or accepted. Students who learn differently are destined to fail only if they are put in a system where that is expected.