[raw]
[/raw]
In the late afternoon on the first Friday in May, a group of about 30 teachers, parents, and specialists filed into a room at Henry Sibley High School in Mendota Heights. It was clear and warm outside, but the group took their seats around a set of tables to talk about special education.
U.S. Rep. Angie Craig, in whose district Henry Sibley is located, called the meeting and invited Sen. Tina Smith to join. The two are supporting legislation to increase federal funding for special education, which has been underfunded for decades. At the same time, enrollment and costs have “exploded” in the West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan school district.
Craig, who has a son with special needs, has met with constituents on several occasions to learn how the lack of federal funding plays out in their schools. “The impact on our local communities is dramatic,” Craig said after the meeting. “We’re sending our federal dollars to Washington and we’re not getting that money back.”
Like most others in the state, the West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan district subsidizes special education services with state and local aid that’s supposed to go toward paying teachers and staff, funding new programs, and buying supplies. Known as the cross-subsidy, the shortfall between the district’s special education costs and their revenue added up to $747 per pupil in 2017, the most recent year data is available from the Minnesota Department of Education. In all, the shortfall was more than $4 million.
It could be worse. The West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan district’s cross-subsidy was lower than the state average for that year. And while others have already cut non-essential programs because of the shortfall, the district still offers music in middle school, school board chair Joanne Mansur told Craig and Smith. But even in the supportive and dedicated community they’ve fostered, the nature of the funding scheme pits groups of students against each other. “It’s a systematic thing that needs to be fixed,” she said. “Help us.”
Lawmakers get it. But will they change it?
The responsibility for the cross-subsidy ultimately falls on the federal government, which passed mandates for special education programs back in the 1970s, setting the foundation for the system that exists today.
Back then, federal lawmakers said they’d pay 40 percent of program costs. But they haven’t. Instead, federal aid has been at or below 15 percent of special education costs (with the exception of 2010, when a recession recovery funding package doubled special education aid for that year).
Minnesota lawmakers are now talking about the problem in both the state Legislature and in Congress. Craig is working with Republican U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber to get congressional newcomers on board with a bill that would increase federal aid over the next 10 years to get to the 40 percent portion. Smith is signed on to a similar proposal in the Senate, but it lacks the bipartisan effort of the House. “It’s going to be a real struggle to get this through this year,” Smith said. “It’s a question of priorities.”
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Taryn Phaneuf[/image_credit][image_caption]Rep. Angie Craig speaking with state Sen. Jim Carlson, DFL-Eagan, following Friday's discussion.[/image_caption]
Groups lobbying the state Legislature about the issue this session have said freezing the cross-subsidy doesn’t do enough because districts aren’t equally affected by it. The districts in the worst position would continue to pay the highest cross-subsidies.
Scott Croonquist, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan School Districts, said taxpayers and legislators alike misunderstand how the cross-subsidy influences school budgets. Many see an increase in general education funding that matches inflation and assume that will fix things. But the money is “really being spent on special education instead of general education,” he said. “It’s become really a crushing burden for many districts and largely explains the financial challenges that many of them face.”
Where it hurts the most
So what does the cross-subsidy look like for different districts in the state?
Three vastly different districts had the largest cross subsidies in 2017. At Nett Lake, a rural district in northern Minnesota that serves the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, special education costs outstripped state and federal aid at a rate of $1,677 per pupil. That’s more than twice the state average that year and higher than Minneapolis Public Schools, where the cross-subsidy was $1,445 per pupil, and St. Cloud Area School District, where it was $1,282 per pupil that year.
But because Nett Lake is a small district, with just more than 100 students, the total cost of its cross-subsidy was about $182,000, compared to $55 million for Minneapolis and about $14 million for St. Cloud.
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Taryn Phaneuf[/image_credit][image_caption]Sen. Tina Smith, right, speaking with Superintendent Peter Olson-Skog of West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan Area Schools, center, following the meeting.[/image_caption]
[raw]
This application requires Javascript which is used to make your web browser more interactive. If this message does not go away, please consider enabling Javascript. Here are instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser.
[/raw]
Minneapolis (+186 percent) and Columbia Heights (+183 percent) recorded the largest increases in the metro.
Red Lake School District saw its cross-subsidy grow by 171 percent — the largest increase of the public school districts where American Indian students make up the entire or the majority of the student body, including Nett Lake.
For some districts, the cross-subsidy is “a nagging problem but it doesn’t break the bank,” said Fred Nolan, executive director of Minnesota Rural Education Association. But for many others, the situation is “pants on fire,” Nolan said. “This is really hampering their ability to provide quality education.”
‘It is all one system’
Metro school districts have a higher average cross-subsidy when separated from the rest of the state. But non-metro districts experience the widest range in the amount of unfunded special education costs they have to cover. For districts with 1,000 to 2,000 students enrolled, the highest cross-subsidy per pupil in 2017 was $1,151 (at Hinckley-Finlayson Public Schools). The lowest was $233 (at Houston Public Schools).
Because they’re small, rural schools can see their costs fluctuate dramatically from year to year, depending on the changes to enrollment, Nolan said. Larger rural districts — the ones that are regional centers, like St. Cloud, Wilmar, or Albert Lea — have a high rate of kids enrolled in special education because of proximity to other services, like hospitals, and a lower cost of living than the Twin Cities. They also have job opportunities.
“If you look at the larger greater Minnesota communities, they have higher than average cross subsidies because families gravitate toward them,” Nolan said.
School district leaders say they’re not looking for reduced mandates to cut costs for special education because they want to continue to protect special education students. But they also don’t want to short-change general education programs.
Lori Posch, executive director of learning and teaching for St. Cloud, said that, yes, costs are going up, but that’s because it’s necessary to include and serve students with a variety of needs. “When I think about the medical world and the advancements we have in medical care, I see that with our special education students, as well. Advanced technology is more expensive but it helps us better meet the needs of our students,” she said. “We are very lucky to have the diversity of students we have. We’re committed to meeting the needs of all our students and we hope the state would be on board with helping us do that equitably.”
At a metro school district like West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan, administrators and staff want more training, more space in specialized programs that have long waiting lists, and more counseling and mental health services. The ripple effect of dipping into general education funding for special education services exacerbates the problem, superintendent Peter Olson-Skog told Craig and Smith while they met Friday.
Fewer resources for general education often means increased class sizes. That leads to less individual attention for students, whose needs may no longer able to be met in class, which leads to more individualized education programs, which leads to higher special education costs, he said. “It is all one system.”
[raw]
$(document).ready(function() { var tableColumns = $.extend(true, {}, { 0: { sTitle: ‘School district’}, 1: { sTitle: ‘2017 per-pupil cross subsidy’, bSearchable: false, sClass: ‘right’, mRender: function(data, type, full) { return “$” + MP.formatters.number(data,2) } }, 2: { sTitle: ‘Change since 2002’, bSearchable: false, iDataSort: 3, sClass: ‘right’, mRender: function(data, type, full) { var s = “Not applicable” if (parseFloat(data)) { s = MP.formatters.number(parseFloat(data)*100,0) + “%” } return s } }, 3: { sTitle: ‘Hidden’, bSearchable: false, bVisible: false, mRender: function(data, type, full) { return MP.formatters.number(data,2) } } });
var options = $.extend(true, {}, { aaData: crossSubsidyData, aoColumns: _.values(tableColumns), order: [[1, “desc”]] }); MP.datatables.makeTable($(‘.datatable-cross-subsidy’), options); });
[/raw]
I think I have this straight, but believing it is another matter. In the 1970s Congress passed a mandate by which it imposed standards for special education allocating the cost 40 percent to the federal government and demanding that local school districts raise the other 60. Then Congress turned around and picked the pockets of the locals to the tune of more than half the federal share while actually making the mandate more costly. Now in the spirit of reform, the proposal Congress makes is that over ten years they will gradually ramp up to their original promise. Apparently they have become so addicted to the proceeds of theft that they need to avoid withdrawal by continuing it. I would remind Representative Craig that local school districts can’t print money.
Perhaps I missed it in this lengthy piece, but would some journalist please give us a comparison between special education classifications in Minnesota compared with other states. And how does our special education policy differ? Without knowing that, citizens have no way of judging whether we’re spending too much, too little, or about right.
This article could have been written anytime in the last 40 + years. When IDEA was signed in 1975 President Ford attached a ‘signing note’ stating he was signing it reluctantly because he predicted the federal government would never pay the 40% written into the law. How right he was.
Since that time we have passed the ADA and we have had section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation act. IDEA is primarily a process statute since students rights are protected by these two other statutes. There are over 800 ‘opportunities’ for a teacher to make a mistake in the written process for each student served under IDEA. The paperwork is staggering and expensive. The there’s the issue of the largest IDEA category IDEA mainly serving reading (ie instructional) failure.
I think it is time to repeal IDEA-there’s no funding only paperwork and schools would still need to serve students with disabilities. You actually don’t have to repeal it-let is sunset as it needs to be renewed every five years. Minnesota and other states could come up with a much more rational delivery system with very little paperwork at less cost.
But don’t doubt that our world leading commitment to include every child in our school system is expensive and I think can be delivered satisfactorily to parents without federal involvement.
You know, the idea of letting IDEA sunset is a great idea. Let it drop away due to its staggering weight, as you say. No one has much of a problem with educating all children of course, but it’s the waste of money chronicling the incremental progress that wastes the money, and the endless numbers of meetings that bring the process to a crawl. Turning teachers into legal clerks has always been a counterproductive and bad idea. And there are better ways of insuring that strong instruction takes place without all the bloat of overbearing monitors insisting on conformance as regards how one reports progress. A better way to require adherence to instructional goals would be to have oversight from administration on site who help set goals and monitor progress, without all the endless paperwork that no one reads or cares much about.
Paragraph mistakenly repeated. Try this:
Many issues at play here other than school districts having to dip into their general funds to pay for special education, since categorical spec ed funding on top of general per student basic grants doesn’t cover it all. For example, my 2004 study for a school district in the Midwest found that it cost $19,000/year on average to educate a special needs child, but earmarked funding for special education on top of the basic grant for all students came to only $17,000. Thus, the cross-subsidy came to $2,000/year/student. The district used these findings to justify their advocacy of renewal of a county-wide special education millage that ultimately was approved by the voters.
But 15 years later, we have many more spec ed students reflecting a serious decline in the health of our children, especially when compared with other industrialized countries. Why is that? I make the case in the following article that suggests two primary causes: (1) several wrong-headed government policies have been compromising our health while increasing our healthcare costs; and (2) our deteriorating lifestyle habits. http://www.educationviews.org/what-we-must-do-to-get-healthier-and-reduce-healthcare-costs-a-matter-of-national-security-and-solvency/
In a word, our physical and fiscal health is being compromised by the fact that too many of our federal and state agencies are captives of the very industries they are supposed to regulate – specifically, the medical, chemical, pharmaceutical, agribusiness/food, telecommunications and environmental protection industries. These industries contribute enormous amounts to political campaigns to help sustain these anti-health policies. They know there is more money to be made by keeping people sick than in keeping them healthy. Schools and the families they serve bear the brunt.
Yet the problems of special ed is more than a funding problem. It is also a performance and accountability problem. One reason is that public schools have a major conflict of interest. They provide all three functions for special ed: (1) diagnosis, (2) prescription (IEP), and (3) filling the prescription (therapy/education). One way to break up their monopoly while gaining more cost-effectiveness is to split up these three functions. Schools currently do it all, and they often misuse funds to keep costs down especially during hard times.
Suppose schools were to only fill prescriptions while a state agency or contractor would diagnose, prescribe and then dole out to providers on a competitive basis sufficient funds to adequately fulfill the child’s prescription (IEP)? Parents who disagree that school applicants can do the job with current staff and programs could opt to use these state and federal funds to hire their child’s therapists and teachers, as suggested here: http://www.educationviews.org/increase-federal-special-education-funding-parental-choice/
Such a competitive checks-and-balance system could well improve spec ed performance, provide relief and hope to affected families and justify governmental subsidies that keep up with increasing spec ed enrollments.
I wonder if Barry Stern has any basis for claiming that “schools…often misuse funds to keep costs down…”. Minnesota schools have been remarkably free from any financial scandals. The suggestion to outsource special education is ridiculous if for no other reason than most of these students are served in the regular classroom most of the time.
I think it is time to conduct some research to see if our Special Education Programs are working. If the research already exists, then it should be part of this article – or a future article for the author to pursue.
In our school district they provide every student with an iPad. Wouldn’t it be better to spend less on needless technology, such as iPad’s, and more on special education. Both of my kids find the iPad’s make it harder to get assignments done. Just redirect money already being wasted on other things. Also, they could pass local referendum’s to raise property taxes. If the people living there won’t contribute more its hard to feel sorry for them.