Feedback sought to help fix special ed

TEA plan creates 46 new positions, comes with $84.5 million price tag

Gov. Greg Abbott, who asked state education officials to quickly draft a plan to ensure children with special needs get a proper education, wants parents and special interest groups to weigh in.

AUSTIN — Gov. Greg Abbott, who asked state education officials to quickly draft a plan to ensure children with special needs get a proper education, wants parents and special interest groups to weigh in.

The Texas Education Agency on Thursday released a 13-page plan to hire more special education staff and provide such services to students who were illegally denied in the past under a benchmark that illegally sought to limit the number of students receiving those resources.

“Gov. Abbott recognizes that fixing special education in Texas is of critical importance and no small task. Although there is much work to be done, he believes this initial action plan is a positive first step in the right direction,” said Ciara Matthews, Abbott’s spokeswoman.

The TEA issued the plan after the U.S. Department of Education last week found the state illegally set an 8.5 percent benchmark on the number of students receiving special education services, well below the national average of 13 percent. A 2016 Houston Chronicle investigation found the practice led school districts to deny access to special education services to tens of thousands of students with disabilities.

The state has since done away with the cap, although federal officials are requiring the state to evaluate students who were denied services and determine if students in special education need more academic support.

While the federal government asked the TEA to report back with its plan, Abbott told the agency to get its work done in a week.

“The next step will be to receive important and critical feedback from stakeholders, including parents and special education groups, to ensure those in need are receiving the best education Texas has to offer,” Matthews said.

As the TEA continues to

tinker with the draft plan, questions remain about how the sweeping plan would be paid for.

The state agency estimated that implementing its Corrective Action Plan, as it’s now written, would cost about $84.5 million over six years. But state lawmakers have been reluctant to allocate funds for education, and last year failed to pass school finance reform that would have directed more state dollars to school districts.

The spending plan that was passed last year shifted nearly $2 billion in public education costs from the state to local taxpayers.

Four main steps

Anne Sung, a Houston ISD trustee who is heading the district’s ad hoc committee on special education, said she’s glad that a state committee is reviewing ways to overhaul Texas’ school-funding system in 2019. She hopes finding ways to better fund special education will be part of that process.

“In speaking with legislators who were involved in drafting (parts of the state’s funding formulas) way back in the 1980s, they say it’s time for an update, especially now that we know more about how to serve students (with) special needs. That work is done in schools and it’s personnel-intensive,” Sung said. “I presume the $85 million is not a lot of money within a state budget, so I just hope that this will be a down payment on further improvements.”

The TEA’s draft action plan outlines four main steps and calls for creating 46 new positions within the TEA’s special education department.

The first step — improving the state’s documentation of how it reviews local special education programs — would shift Texas’ school district monitoring duties from a school improvement team to a team within the special education department. The TEA says this will provide more capacity to oversee districts. The first corrective action calls for the agency to increase the number of people reviewing districts’ actions and to publicly release all its reports. That step alone would cost $2.3 million annually, with $500,000 required at the onset.

The second step, which would cost $28 million over five years, would have the TEA create a plan and timeline for school districts to identify students eligible for special education services who were denied access in the past. The TEA would contract with a third-party vendor to launch an outreach campaign to inform families of their rights and would expand a special education call center.

It also would require school districts to provide compensatory services to students who are found to need special education services but were denied, and it would create a state fund to help school districts shoulder those costs.

The plan also would require districts to identify all students who were in the state’s dyslexia program for six or more months.

A cheaper alternative

The TEA and school districts across Texas had used the state’s dyslexia services as a cheaper alternative to providing special education services to students who needed them, the Chronicle investigation and the DOE found.

That prompted the TEA’s third planned corrective action — to ensure the state’s dyslexia programs will no longer be used to delay or deny special education services. To do that, the draft plan calls for a third-party vendor to create a suite of resources for families explaining the differences between the state’s dyslexia program and special education services that their children might be entitled to.

It would require professional development for all educators statewide. That part of the plan would cost $17.5 million up front and $3.65 million annually.

The final step would have the TEA create a timeline to monitor how districts provide special education services. The plan would create a special education escalation team of 17 staffers devoted to helping school districts with the most dire special education needs.

The plan calls for spending the first three years focusing on districts with the largest gaps between students identified with special needs and those who previously should have been identified. It would cost $1.5 million to implement initially, and $1.5 million each year after that.

Lauren Callahan, a spokeswoman for the TEA, stressed that the plan was a draft and could change in the coming months. She said the agency would create a survey and publish it on its website by Tuesday, and encouraged parents and others to send feedback to TexasSPED@tea.texas.gov.

“These are specific areas we identified where corrective action should take place,” Callahan said. “But we want to hear from the field to see if there are different ideas or things we should add to what we submitted.”