Oregon Department of Education data shows that up to a quarter of the students in the state who require special education services do not get counted in the formula that provides additional special education funding to schools. (Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)
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In recent years, Oregon’s State School Fund has not paid for all of the special education services needed by nearly 80,000 students in the state.
Oregon Department of Education data shows that up to a quarter of the students in the state who require special education services are not counted in the formula that provides additional special education funding to schools due to a 30-year-old law capping spending on special education.
It’s forced schools to pull from other pots of money to meet their legal obligations to provide special education services, curtailing investment in other student measures or cutting other parts of their budgets, state education officials said Tuesday in a meeting of the House Committee on Education.
They focused on the problem of unfunded special education mandates to press upon lawmakers the need to increase spending on students with special needs.
“The financial pressures on school districts to meet the needs of students with disabilities are mounting, with current funding mechanisms increasingly falling short,” Kara Williams, director of inclusive services at Oregon’s education department, told legislators.
In the 2022-23 school year, the state gave school districts about $696 million to meet the needs of students with special needs, such as physical, developmental and learning disabilities like autism and speech and language impairment. But the districts spent more than $1 billion to meet these students’ needs, according to the education department, leaving schools to cobble together the extra $375 million from other streams of funding, such as the Student Success Act meant to improve outcomes for underserved students.
Williams, other agency officials and advocates urged the Legislature to increase a cap on special education funding that was implemented in the 1990s. That current cap only funds special education services for up to 11% of students in a school, even though today nearly 15% of students in the average Oregon school are enrolled in special education programs. Officials from the Oregon Department of Education and student and school advocates want the cap increased to 15% of a school’s student population.
With the current cap, about 19,000 students with special needs among the 80,000 total don’t count for additional funding under the school funding formula. The state offers a waiver for some districts with high numbers of students with special needs, but this covers only about 7,000 additional students.
In only 29 of the state’s 197 districts do special needs students account for less than 11% of the student body. On the other hand, more than 160 districts have more special education students than the state is funding. If the state moved the cap to 15%, according to education department data, more than 110 districts would have adequate funding for their special education students and services for nearly 16,000 more students would be funded.
“When you talk to our K-12 members across the state, the chronic underfunding of (special education) that Ms. Williams just illustrated so well, and the ways it impacts our students, is the number one concern that you will hear in the classroom today,” said Louis DeSitter, a lobbyist for the Oregon Education Association, the state’s largest teacher’s union.
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