Why CT special education funding bills are dividing advocates
Jessika Harkay / CT Mirror
Sen. Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox, D-Trumbull, spoke at a press conference Monday in support of newly proposed legislation that she feels would address several issues pertaining to special education.
Special education advocates are split on whether two proposed bills are the best steps forward in tackling concerns about the quality of student services, cost and accountability.
Leaders of the Select Committee on Special Education described House Bill 7277 and Senate Bill 1561 at a news conference Monday morning as “a historical way for Connecticut” to pay for special education and make the school systems and their services more equitable for students with disabilities.
“Through this bill, we make sure that special education is real and not just on paper and not just in certain communities — that special education for students with special needs, and all learning needs, is equal and accessible in any district that you live in,” said Committee Co-chair Rep. Maryam Khan, D-Windsor.
Her fellow co-chair Sen. Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox, D-Trumbull, added that special education is “at a point” where it’s “not sustainable, and we need to have better oversight.”
“Part of what the bill will do is to provide us the oversight and the data that we don’t currently have, to understand why costs are what they are, why we’ve seen a continuing rise in costs and what we can do to help maintain those costs while always maintaining a commitment to our students,” Gadkar-Wilcox said Monday.
Not everyone was so optimistic. Even other lawmakers on the committee had reservations about the bills Monday and said they needed more work, time and revisions in certain sections to ensure they didn’t have unintended consequences.
“We have to be very careful what we do here, because this will have a long-term impact on our children, not just the ones in school today but the ones in school tomorrow and the ones in school decades from now,” said Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, a member of the select committee and co-chair of the state legislature’s Appropriations Committee.
Cost changes
The two omnibus bills each contain more than 50 sections and 60 pages, with several provisions that would require more oversight from the Office of Policy and Management and would change how private special education programs are funded and may bill for services.
The bills would prohibit any tuition raises for private special education providers in the 2025-26 academic year and would pause the opening of any new programs until 2027, a change that generated some fierce pushback.
But the bills also would require OPM and the state Department of Education to “collect and analyze the tuition, rates and other fees for special education” when students are outsourced from their home school district and then create what they believe are appropriate fixed costs for services.
Establishing those fixed costs would involve “establishing a universal special education and related services rate schedule” that would include “an individualized rate for each special education service provided to a student pursuant to an individualized education program and standards for how a charging entity may include its operating expenses into the total costs for services charged to a local or regional board of education,” according to House Bill 7277.
Connecticut public schools spend nearly $2.7 billion annually on special education services. For some districts, special education costs make up a significant portion of their budgets. For example, in Hartford, which educates more than 4,000 students with disabilities, about 33% of its total education budget, or around $151 million, goes toward special education, Mayor Arunan Arulampalam said Monday.
“Of that $151 million, $80 million is in tuition and $22.8 million is just in transportation of special ed students,” Arulampalam said in support of the bill. “Less than a third of our special ed costs are being spent on in-district special ed services for Hartford Public School students, and that number is ballooning.”
Advocates supporting the bill include the Connecticut Education Association, the largest teacher’s union in the state, and local superintendents and municipal leaders from across the state.
“When the city of Hartford comes, and other cities like us come to you, it’s not asking for a handout,” Arulampalam said. “It is an ask for a partnership to work together to create a strong foundation for our students and to create a better and stronger state in the future. I think this bill creates a pathway toward that, both with funding the short term … but also, importantly, a real structural impact by capping the cost of outplacement services.”
Hundreds opposed
But more than 700 written statements were submitted opposing the bill and tuition caps. Many who opposed the bill, whether in writing or at the public hearing Monday, were parents, special education lawyers and some lawmakers who were on the committee.
“This is not a good bill, or at least, needs a tremendous amount of work,” said Andrew Feinstein, a longtime special education attorney and legislative chair for the advocacy group Special Education Equity for Kids of Connecticut. “There are some good sections, which we support, but by and large, this effort to destroy private providers, which is absolutely what this bill will do, is just unacceptable.”
Feinstein also served as a tri-chair on the Task Force to Study Special Education Services and Funding, which was convened in 2021 by state statue, and presented its findings and recommendations earlier this year.
On Monday, he said the committee’s effort to impose fixed special education rates would “destroy private programs” and in turn cause great harm to the state’s students with the most severe disabilities.
“The critical fact is that we need these placements as a part of the continuum of educational placements. Many have long waiting lists. For example, Hubbard North, which opened recently in Rocky Hill, has 20 enrolled students and a waiting list of 50. It takes time, money and staff to build up capacity,” Feinstein wrote in his testimony. “District special education directors do not lightly outplace students. They do so when there is no way that the student can be educated within the district. There can be no doubt that this bill, if enacted, would reduce the number of slots for disabled students to be outplaced. A rate schedule, designed to reduce costs, will convince many operators that the income available from tuition and fees is insufficient to cover costs and [will] close up shop.”
Osten agreed at the public hearing. She said staff members, like paraeducators in public school districts, often make minimum wage and that she hopes the proposed legislation is “not saying that we want to get those outplacement schools to a level that we’re giving them minimum wage to take care of those kids.”
“When we talk about capping programs and monitoring expenses, I worry about what we think is the right things to do — by having the Office of Policy Management oversee some of these things and come up with a plan in a short timeframe,” Osten said, adding that in the 1980s and ’90s, a similar initiative resulted in the closure of education programs.
“Back then, we said, ‘We are not going to fund these types of [special education] programs,’ and programs that were successful for my family are no longer in business anymore,” Osten said, referring to her family’s personal experience navigating special education systems decades ago. “They went out of business a long time ago.”
Grants
In another effort to help local municipalities with special education costs, the two bills propose at least three state-funded grants, including a “special education offset grant,” another that would provide $50 million in transportation reimbursement and a third that would give additional funding for districts to expand or improve in-district or regional special education programming.
Gov. Ned Lamont recently supported funding for more in-district programming, allotting $14 million in his proposed budget for a grant program to help districts develop ways to educate more students with disabilities in-district rather than sending them to private programs outside the district.
And while the bills proposed special license plates to raise money for special education costs, it’s uncertain whether that would be enough to fully fund the grant programs.
Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker strongly opposed the bills and said the state Department of Education didn’t have the capacity or resources to carry out the grant proposals.
“We believe that there are sections of this proposal that the department can support, however, there are many that we cannot,” Russell-Tucker said in written testimony.
The special education offset grant alone would cost the state Department of Education approximately $190 million, Russell-Tucker said, “not including the 14 additional full-time employees we are estimating that we will need to carry out the work of the entire bill proposal, none of which are included in the governor’s budget.”
In testimony, some supported increasing state support for special education through these grant programs, but some stakeholders also wondered whether they were feasible.
“We’re totally for this offset grant, but where’s the money coming from?” Feinstein said at the public hearing. “We know that this isn’t happening. This is another shell game that the legislature loves to play.”
“My thoughts exactly,” said Rep. Lezlye Zupkus, R-Prospect, a ranking member of the Education Committee and member of the Select Committee on Special Education, in response to Feinstein’s criticism. “Where is all the money coming from for this piece of legislation?”
Possible parent support
Parents navigating the special education system have consistently referred to it as a “battlefield,” full of legal and educational jargon and uncertainty about the full extent of rights.
The legislation offers extra support to families by proposing the creation of an educational ombudsperson that would be tasked with:
- Receiving, reviewing and solving complaints from students and their families;
- Gathering and analyzing data “on students and young people” to help public agencies and lawmakers develop policy;
- Assisting student loan borrowers understand their rights and responsibilities;
- Analyzing implementation of federal, state and local laws.
The bills also calls on the state Department of Education to work to simplify Individualized Education Program forms and create a parent guide on special education rights and timelines.
The proposals will be taken up for vote by the Select Committee on Special Education Friday.
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