Podcast Transcript: A $2 Billion Gap: The Financial Reality of Special Education in Texas Public Schools

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 4

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

MORGAN SMITH: Welcome to the Intersect Ed Podcast, where the stories of public education policy and practice meet.

I’m your host, Morgan Smith. Today, we are diving into an often misunderstood topic: special education. We’ll talk to two educators and a public policy expert about how Texas public schools provide special education services to the almost 800,000 students with disabilities in the state — and learn about why it costs so much to do it right. 

Over the last decade, the number of students with special education needs has grown rapidly — and Texas public schools have both a moral and a legal obligation to educate them. Though districts receive state and federal funds to do so, that money isn’t enough, forcing school leaders to make tough decisions to draw funds from other programs. For the most recent school year for which we have data, that amounted to a shortfall of about $2 billion. That’s right — Texas school districts are covering an extra $2 billion in funding on top of what they get from the state and federal government to ensure special education students receive the services they need. 

But before we go deeper into the issue of funding, let’s back up a bit and talk about why special education services are so important — and why they are so resource-intensive.

STEVEN ALEMAN: It’s about giving an equal opportunity to a student who, with some support can grow just as much as any other student, can demonstrate knowledge and abilities just like any other student. They just need some assistance in doing that.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Steven Aleman, a senior policy specialist with Disability Rights Texas, an advocacy organization for people with disabilities. 

STEVEN ALEMAN: And ultimately, just like everything else, what we hope for in public education at the end of the day is a productive citizen who’s contributing to society, contributing to the economy, and people with disabilities have just as much to contribute, needless to say, as anyone else, and have that potential. And if they don’t get the skills and the support they need in public education, then where is that going to happen? It is not going to happen. Just like everyone else, we count on public education. The core function of public education, it’s not just as, as important it is, the books and the reading and the learning. It’s about the formation of relationships and friendships and being able to function in society productively.

MORGAN SMITH: About 14% of Texas public school students receive special education services, which is almost double the percentage of those who received them a decade ago. The students who receive them have a broad spectrum of disabilities that require varying levels of accommodations that can range from the simple — like assistance with test taking — to the incredibly complex — like the support it takes to navigate the behavioral, emotional, and mobility challenges that come with more severe impairments. To provide these kinds of services — which can start at birth and continue to age 22 — school districts must contract with all different kinds of professional staff — from diagnosticians to licensed psychologists to speech pathologists. 

AMANDA FUENTES: My current role is Inclusion Teacher. I work with students in the classroom who have dyslexia, I have some who have specific learning disabilities in reading and math, and some of them have some emotional disabilities as well. So there’s a big range of working with academics and then also behavior and balancing the two. Sometimes, it’s more focusing on getting kids to finish work or helping them stay on task and just giving that support wherever needed, either academically or behaviorally.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Amanda Fuentes. She is the Special Education Team Lead at Cibolo Valley Elementary School in the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District near San Antonio. Her job requires many layers of skills, from knowing which of many different academic and behavioral tools will best set each student up for success to interfacing with all the adults in their lives — their classroom teachers, their parents, all of the professional aides who help them manage their disabilities.

AMANDA FUENTES: There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes that people don’t see, really connecting with those families, making those relationships. They’re lifelong. Making sure the kids are successful because our end goal in education is for them to be a successful member of society, so making sure that we are setting up a plan from when they first get identified and put in to receive special education services. Just making sure that we’re setting them up for success and making sure that we’re doing the best that we can for them and giving them everything that we can.

MORGAN SMITH: So what does it cost to provide this level of investment in kids who need these services? Paige Meloni, the superintendent of the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District, where Amanda Fuentes works as a teacher, says her district spends about 60% over what it receives from state and federal funding to provide mandated special education services. That figure, she says, is standard for most districts across Texas.

PAIGE MELONI: I have a lot of parents that will ask me all the time, “Why can’t we have this? Why can’t we have that? You know, we would like something for this particular athletic program,” or, “We’d like to start this new club in our school,” or, “We need better instruments, larger instruments in the band,” things like that. It’s very difficult to manage expectations of all the parents when your funding formula is finite and you’re required by law in some of the programs for a spending requirement. And there is no spending requirement that I know of for football, and there’s no spending requirement that I know of for a marching band. And there is no spending requirement that I know of to put on a play every year at the high school that the whole community comes to. But the minute that you turn those things off as a superintendent, you’re going to get run out of town. So those are the things that really keep me up at night is providing these opportunities no matter who the kid is.

MORGAN SMITH: Paige Meloni said that lawmakers — and others who might not be familiar with special education — can have a hard time understanding the complexities of the services school districts provide. If they visited the high school in her district, she said, it would probably take about three hours to tour through and describe all services happening there on a regular day. 

PAIGE MELONI: They would see, sometimes in a regular classroom setting, a student who has trouble with note-taking, just a person who, a paraprofessional who is there who would be helping those students in the general education classroom. They might see a visually impaired student who’s in all regular education classroom and only needs help during transitions. They might see, or they would see in some self-contained special education classroom, students with some severe disabilities that require nursing care but are still accessing sometimes even the general curriculum. They would see a setting for autistic students that are teaching students about scheduling and routine and things that we implement here at school and at home that help them navigate their home life as well. They would see, even in some of our extracurricular programs, that students with disabilities are being able to participate to the maximum extent possible.

And one of the most beautiful things that they would see is our students who do not receive special education services are accepting of all of these students, no matter what, and care for them and help them along the way. And many times at the high school, they’ve been with these students since they were in elementary school, and there’s just a certain care.

MORGAN SMITH: Here’s Steven Aleman again. 

STEVEN ALEMAN: It’s important for school districts to have the resources in their special education, in the special education area for two reasons. One is just pragmatic that as costs grow because special education populations are growing, school districts have the responsibility, and frankly, they’re at the short end of the food chain here, at the end of the food chain, where they have to pay for these costs. If the federal government isn’t going to reimburse them, if the state isn’t going to reimburse them, that means that other expenses have to go by the wayside because we have an obligation to help these students and serve students with disabilities.

But more importantly, it’s that investment in the students themselves. So special education funding, fundamentally is about, yes, the dollar signs in terms of the burden on school districts and where they’re having to pull from other places, but ultimately, it’s about the investment in a child and what that child’s potential is like. 

MORGAN SMITH: That promise of public education to bring about a child’s best potential as a member of society is what drives Paige Meloni and other educators to continue their work despite the many challenges that come their way. 

PAIGE MELONI: When we think of our history in Texas public schools, there’s a whole lot out there that would say what we have to do, what does the law say that we have to do? And then we also have to think about 50 years ago that students with disabilities wouldn’t be served at all. Some of them wouldn’t even have access. 

And so we want to do that. I mean, we have an altruistic nature to want to do that, but let’s just talk about what it does for society and what we need to be a productive society. 

Every student is not going to go to college. They’re not going to go to law school, they’re not going to become a doctor, but they can have a meaningful career contributing to something that makes a difference in our society. And we are a big part of getting children ready for just that. We’re meeting them no matter where they are, and we’re taking them through a pathway that will make them successful for their own family but then also something that will contribute to society as a whole.

MORGAN SMITH: With less than half of the legislative session remaining, lawmakers are currently considering two major bills that contain recommendations from the Texas Commission on Special Education Funding. SB 568, from Sen. Paul Bettencourt, modifies our current special education funding weights to a new intensity of service model. HB 2, from Rep. Brad Buckley, has similar language in hopes to create new funding tiers for our special education students. The Senate has $700 million set aside for these provisions. 

To stay informed on these measures and other critical education issues, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across the Lawn weekly newsletter at http://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/get-involved. 

Today’s episode was written by me, Morgan Smith. Our sound engineer is Brian Diggs, and our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt.

Thank you for listening to Intersect Ed. If you want to learn more about how to support Texas public education or how to get involved, head over to RaiseYourHandTexas.org.