Special Ed Crisis in DC: A Look at Our Future?

Today's Washington Post has a chilling article about the utter breakdown-in-progress of the Washington D.C. special education system. Almost one in five special education students are now placed in private programs--at district expense--because of the public schools' inability to offer anything close to a free, appropriate public education for students with disabilities.

D.C. school officials have promised repeatedly over the past decade to improve and expand public school programs for disabled students, which would cut the number of children placed in the expensive private facilities. But many administrators and teachers throughout the system say they fear that the spending trends are becoming self-perpetuating: As the tuition payments grow, there is less and less money to hire the teachers, therapists, social workers and other specialists needed to make the public programs more acceptable to parents and hearing officers hired by the school system.

That pattern has created some glaring inefficiencies in spending. At Lafayette Elementary School in Northwest Washington, for example, Principal Gail Lynn Main said 12 to 15 students have been sent to private academies over the past three years since she lost one of her two special education teachers during systemwide budget cuts and could no longer meet the students' needs. Based on the average tuition bill, the school system could have avoided spending $600,000 to $750,000 a year if it had given her the $42,000 she needed to hire the extra teacher.

In addition to the tuition bills, the District is responsible for reimbursing parents' legal fees when it loses a case before a hearing officer. Those two categories of expenses make up more than half of the District's special education budget, compared with one-third in fiscal 2000. And special education's share of the total D.C. school budget has grown from one-fifth to one-third during that period.

Please note that this is not extra-special education at public expense: this is just an effort to get kids with special needs (most of them low-income and members of minority groups, judging from the overall demographics of the D.C. public schools) the basics of what they are entitled to under Federal law from any public school in the country.

San Francisco is not D.C. -- yet. In D.C., 18 percent of total enrollment receives special education services (compared to 12 percent here), and the district's current fix has been made much worse by some very bad financial management. But it does not bode well for the future that SFUSD's Special Education programs are down for $1.2 million in cuts for the 2006-07 school year, or 20 percent of the $6 million in cuts originally recommended for next year. Why should 12 percent of SFUSD students -- arguably the district's neediest -- absorb 20 percent of the cuts? Is this the same "penny wise, pound foolish" approach to special education spending that has put D.C. into crisis mode?