Special Education Budget

Special education swells school budget

By Sanjay Bhatt
Seattle Times staff reporter

More than a dozen children in Seattle Public Schools are prone to brain-damaging seizures and require personal nurses throughout the school day.

Other students have such severe attention disorders that a full-time instructional aide is assigned to stay by each child's side and keep the focus on learning.

And in an elementary-school program for children with cochlear implants (an advancement over hearing aids), one teacher and an instructional aide work with nine students, with support from audiologists and speech-language pathologists. A bilingual interpreter also works with those children who come from non-English-speaking homes.

District officials say the soaring number of students needing these small, individualized and expensive special-education programs has played a role in the district's projected $13 million shortfall next year. They say inadequate state and federal money for such programs is contributing to its financial problems.

The district takes pride in its services to disabled students and has made no recommendations for significant cuts in special-education funding to balance the budget, instead looking elsewhere for cuts and new sources of money.

Still, the draw of Seattle's special-education programs presents a dilemma.

Nearly 6,000 of the Seattle district's 46,500 students have a diagnosed learning, emotional or physical disability that entitles them to extra services or accommodations under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

While the total number of special-education students in Seattle's public schools hasn't changed much, the number of those who are the most expensive to educate has skyrocketed. Since 1998, the district has seen its enrollment of kids with autism and health impairment grow annually by an average of 21 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

One of the largest providers of special-education services in King, Kitsap and Pierce counties, Seattle Public Schools serves almost one in six of the area's autistic students, one in five "orthopedically impaired" students (including those with cerebral palsy) and more than one in 10 "health impaired" students (including those with epilepsy, severe asthma and cancer).

The Seattle district has become something of a magnet for families of disabled children, often because of the services offered by Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Center and the University of Washington's Experimental Education Unit, said Sara Woolverton, the district's special-education manager. A partnership with the UW has resulted in more children with autism being identified earlier.

"It's all about medical technology," Woolverton said. "Medical technology has created a situation where we have this wave of children who are incredibly involved."

Seattle's high "excess cost"

Seattle will spend $3,360 more per special-education pupil than it receives from state and federal agencies, district records show. This "excess cost," a term the district uses, is substantially smaller for surrounding Puget Sound districts, which as a group spend on average $1,658 per pupil more than they receive from state and federal sources for special education.

Seattle Schools officials say they spend more because:

• Seattle's special-education students tend to have more-complex physical and behavioral problems, which in turn are more expensive to manage in the classroom.

• Special-education students comprise more than 13 percent of Seattle Public Schools' enrollment, while their peers in most surrounding districts account for less than 12.7 percent — the state's limit on special-education allocations. If it weren't for the cap, the Seattle district would get about $1.1 million in additional state funding.

While Seattle has become a haven for medically fragile students, children with mild learning disabilities also receive extra attention in resource rooms.

In Seattle, the ratio at both the elementary and secondary levels is 22 special-education students to one teacher.

In Highline and Northshore, it's 27-to-1, and in Lake Washington, 26-to-1. In Shoreline, it's 27-to-1 at the elementary level and 15-to-1 at the secondary level, according to Seattle Public Schools' records.

Students with more-severe disabilities attend even smaller, "self-contained" classes.

"Seattle, I think, is phenomenal in the field of special education to have these ratios, and I'm hopeful we can keep those," said Michelle Corker-Curry, who directs special education, bilingual and other federally funded programs for the district.

School-finance officials in Seattle and other districts complain that because the state doesn't fully fund special education, they are forced to use more of their local levy — at the expense of their regular students.

"If the pie is only so big and you're forcing districts to spend resources on mandates, that means another area has to get a smaller slice," said Rich Moore, assistant superintendent for business in the Renton School District. "With all the focus on improving student learning — that's our primary mission — that means less and less resources are available to meet [basic-education] students' needs. We'd like to provide resources to serve every student."

Advocates for the disabled praise Seattle for its greater commitment to special education, but they feel they're being singled out by the district as it looks to shore up its finances.

Seattle parent Mary Maddox, a special-education advocate, believes the district needs to be more aggressive in pursuing money from the state for all students.

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com