Posted: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 7:09 pm | Updated: 1:20 am, Thu Dec 12, 2013.
HARRISBURG — It’s been six years since the state Legislature gave school districts more money to cover special education costs.The state’s special education funding to 500 school districts has been capped at about $1 billion since 2008-09, while the number of special education students has risen about 3 percent to 268,466 — one in every seven public students in the state.
“It doesn’t take a mathematician to prove that’s really a loss,” East Penn School District Superintendent Thomas Seidenberger said.
“It is my sincere belief as member and a co-chair of this commission that adoption of these recommendations by the General Assembly will greatly improve the accuracy, transparency and effectiveness of Pennsylvania’s funding for special education programming for the benefit of all our special education students and the commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a whole in the future,” Browne said at a hearing in which the commission presented its 75-page funding report.
The proposed formula would distribute new money based on the severity of a student’s disability, as opposed to the existing formula that dispenses money under the assumption that 16 percent of all students in all districts have at least one of a dozen legally recognized disabilities.
“We’re no longer going to pay for special education based on an archaic formula that every school district has the same number, or percentage, of special education students in their district,” said O’Neill, R-29, who has been working toward developing a new special education funding formula for eight years. “Moving forward, every school district is going to be required to count and provide to the Department of Education the number of special education students they have total, and how they’re broken down into the three categories.”
But Seidenberger said the commission’s report does not go far enough. All the report will do is reshuffle money, creating winners and losers among districts, he said. It does not address the fundamental problem of stagnant special education funds coming from Harrisburg, he said.
“Level funding, especially in the case of special education funding, doesn’t work,” Seidenberger said.
The commission was precluded by law from developing a new funding formula for existing money or recommending more funding, Browne said. But that does not mean the commission’s work was for naught. Over time, he said, the new funding formula would work to more fairly distribute funds based on real special education costs.
“It’s going to be based on true cost and true number of students,” O’Neill said.
The General Assembly could add more money to special education in the coming fiscal year, Browne said. It could also decide to use the commission’s recommended funding formula to alter the existing funding formula as part of future budgets, he said.
The average cost to provide extra learning or physical support to special education students in Pennsylvania is $13,028. But costs can easily exceed $25,000 per child depending on the severity of need, as happened at East Penn this year when an unexpected influx of 15 disabled students, including several autistic children, increased its special education costs by more than $840,000.
Under the commission’s plan, special education money increases would be based on a three-tiered formula tied to individual students’ needs in each district and publicly funded charter schools. The state would differentiate special education services among least intensive to most intensive at costs ranging from $25,000 or less, $35,000 to $50,000, to $50,000 or more.
The report does not recommend which disabilities fall into each cost category.
But in theory, districts and publicly funded charter schools and cyber charter schools would get less money to provide students with a relatively cheap service such as speech therapy. They would get more for an expensive service such as autism education as opposed to districts’ and charter schools’ getting the same amounts for each category.
The formula also would be weighted to take into account a local district’s poverty level and property tax base to ensure districts can cover the costs of providing services to all special education. A special weighted protection would be given to small rural districts.
“Ultimately this formula, or the proposal for this formula that’s recommended in this report, I think does more for special-needs students than has been done in the last 23 years,” Lancaster County Rep. Mike Sturla said at the hearing.
The state’s overall special education budget includes a small contingency fund to help districts defray a portion of their costs of special education costs for individual students whose needs exceed $75,000. The commission recommended separating the “extraordinary cost fund” from the overall superficial education budget to increase transparency.
But shuffling the money will not help school districts if lawmakers are not willing to cover the full cost of care, Seidenberger said.
“We got about $150,000 in the contingency and we qualified for $900,000 (this year),” he said. “You can ask any school in (the Lehigh Valley), what did we send the state and what did we get, it’s going to be a low percentage.”
No special education funding formula will be perfect, acting Secretary of Education Carolyn Dumaresq said. But the commission’s recommended formula comes close to achieving fairness to all parties and Gov. Tom Corbett endorses it, she said.
The new formula would only go into effect if the Legislature and Corbett adopt the formula into law and direct extra money into special education in 2014-15 or future years.
The commission will hold another public hearing in 2014 to present its report to the House and Senate.
The full report can be found on Browne’s website: www.senatorbrowne.com/.
Calkins Media staff writer Natasha Lindstrom contributed to this report.
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