Patrick to look at limits put on special ed
Spokesman says office is working to ensure kids are ‘identified and served appropriately’
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick expresses concern about the Texas Education Agency’s arbitrary 8.5 percent “benchmark” for special education enrollments.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick expressed concern Monday about the Texas Education Agency’s arbitrary 8.5 percent “benchmark” for special education enrollments in Texas schools that has driven the percentage of disabled children receiving therapy, counseling and tutoring to the lowest rate in the nation.
“Helping children with disabilities has been a priority for the Lt. Governor even before he was elected to public office and he was very concerned to learn about prior policies,” Patrick’s spokesman, Alejandro Garcia, said in a statement. “Our office is working very closely with the Commissioner of Education to ensure that students are identified and served appropriately.”
The move aligns the conservative leader of the state Senate with state House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, who also has expressed concern about the benchmark.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s office has so far declined comment.
Patrick’s statement came one day after the Houston Chronicle reported that the Laredo Independent School District and numerous others across the state have responded to TEA pressure to meet the enrollment benchmark by removing children with autism, learning disabilities, stuttering and other speech impairments and mental disabilities from special education. In the Laredo ISD, more than 700 children were removed from special education in 2007, when only 78 new students entered the program.
After a six-month investigation, the Chronicle reported last month that the TEA had quietly implemented the 8.5 percent enrollment target without consulting state lawmakers, the federal government or any research. The agency has since aggressively enforced the target by requiring districts serving too many kids to implement Corrective Action Plans, among
other punishments, that describe the steps they plan to take to reduce their special education enrollments.
In the 12 years since its implementation, the percentage of special education students in Texas has dropped from near the national average of 13 percent to exactly 8.5 percent, by far the lowest of any state
in America. The state’s two largest school systems, Houston and Dallas, are even lower, at 7.4 percent and 6.9 percent, the lowest rates among the country’s major school districts. If special education enrollments in Texas were at the national average, an additional 250,000 children
would be receiving services.
Federal law obligates all public schools to provide specialized education to all eligible children with disabilities. In response to the Chronicle investigation, the U.S. Department of Education on Oct. 3 ordered the TEA to end the target unless it can prove that no kids have been deprived of services. The department also told state officials to report on how many school districts may have denied services to students with disabilities and how they plan to “remedy the effect of such past practices.”
TEA officials have said they will review the benchmark without conceding that any eligible child has been deprived of an appropriate special education mandated by federal law.
State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, said she was “shocked and outraged” by the Chronicle’s report on Sunday, in which one former Laredo ISD elementary school speech therapist, Maricela Gonzalez, described how she and others were ordered to purge the special education rolls.
“We basically just picked kids and weeded them out,” she said.
Zaffirini vowed to join with other lawmakers to create legislation to eliminate the special education “cap.”
It is unclear how Patrick, a former chairman of the Senate’s Education Committee, hopes to address the issue. His office declined comment.