Texas saved billions cutting special ed; now bill comes due

Texas’s 5.4 million students are returning to school amid the usual scramble for textbooks, lockers and desks. The state is also facing a huge problem of its own creation: how to find, evaluate and properly teach as many as 200,000 students wrongly denied special education or overlooked as it sought to limit spending for the nation’s fastest-growing school population.

And then there’s the question of how Texas, under orders from the U.S. government, will pay for it all.

The federal mandate, intended to make up for a de facto cap put in place by the Texas Education Agency in 2004, may amount to the biggest single expansion of special education services ever. For more than a decade, local school districts were pressured to turn away students in need. Now that must be undone.

Nationwide, schools are struggling to provide special education services in the face of tight budgets, heightened legal scrutiny and shortages of qualified teachers, psychologists and therapists.

It’s been almost two years since the Houston Chronicle revealed that the percentage of students in Texas special education classes had fallen by roughly a third since the TEA set enrollment targets in 2004. Before then, the special education share in Texas was 11.8 percent of all students, not far below the national average. Over the next decade, the Texas figure fell to 8.6 percent, while enrollment nationwide remained largely unchanged.

While the TEA denied that the target had been meant as a cap, the U.S. Department of Education concluded in January that it had functioned as one. According to the report, administrators and teachers told federal investigators they’d felt pressured to reduce special education enrollment, with one superintendent saying that “he ‘leans on the administrators’ if the numbers are too high because the school board ‘leans on him.’ ”

U.S. officials ruled that both the state and local districts in Texas had violated the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, a federal law that requires all students who qualify receive special education services.

Lindsay Jones, the chief policy and advocacy officer for the National Center on Learning Disabilities, or NCLD, called the move to deprive vulnerable students of necessary services “absolutely the largest-scale violation” of the law since its passage in 1975.

By one TEA estimate, the level of enrollment before 2004 indicates that as many as 200,000 students who should be getting special education services are not. Additionally, by one estimate more than 150,000 students who have since left may have gone unserved.

As the 2018-19 school year starts, the TEA is under orders from Washington to ensure that districts find, evaluate and provide services to eligible students currently enrolled, and offer compensatory services to those who missed out.