By: Nathan Levenson
Special education costs are rising, as are the number of students with complex needs. In addition, “No Child Left Behind” demands higher levels of student achievement as school budgets are shrinking. While districts push state and federal government for more funds, they are largely on their own to tackle the dual challenge of controlling costs and improving student achievement.
We have a moral – and legal – imperative to not just cut services for these students; tough financial times don’t change the reality that students with special needs are often learning at a less-than-satisfactory level. Our challenge is to do more and spend less. What can districts do to balance the budget and improve student outcomes?
Step 1: Change the focus
Stop talking about cost-cutting and instead focus on cost-effectiveness. It’s a difference that cuts to the heart of the matter. Cost cutting assumes that districts are taking something away from children. Cost-effectiveness means getting the same or better results for less money.
Step 2: Ensure sufficient financial and logistic expertise
In most districts, special education is an island unto itself, but few special educators are trained in scheduling, financial analysis, forecasting and purchasing. These are the very skills that a district needs in order to make special education more cost-effective. By creating a team with diverse talents and partnering with general education, districts can often reduce special education costs and improve outcomes. General educators and administrators can bring “outside-the-special education-box” ideas and expertise to the table.
Step 3: Conduct an Opportunities Review
A ‘Review of Opportunities’ involves gathering data, surveying and interviewing staff, observing classrooms and crunching numbers. This information can be used to identify and analyze trends, compare findings to local and national benchmarks, and assess strategies to determine which hold the most promise for district.
Step 4: Reduce new referrals by shifting some remediation to general education
The best way to reduce special education costs and raise academic achievement is for fewer students to need special education services because they are learning in the regular classroom.
In most districts, children can’t get intensive reading support or limited speech or counseling without an Individual Education Program (IEP). At the secondary level, Math and English remediation are often reserved for special education students. Rather than push struggling students into special education, districts can choose to improve general education instruction.
One district built an extensive RTI (Response to Intervention) reading program and opened it to all students. The support was tightly connected to the everyday classroom instruction. Short-term counseling was provided. Math and English remediation was opened to all students. These programs were cost neutral in the short-run because they shifted resources from special education to general education without adding more staff. In the long run, they decreased costs by reducing the need for special education services. This strategy was controversial but the results speak for themselves: academic achievement by students in special education rose by 26% in English and 22% in Math.
Step 5: Teach all students to read in the early grades
About half of the referrals to special education are, at their root cause, for reading difficulties. Referral rates jump in third through sixth grades when reading problems make it more difficult for students to learn math, science and social studies.
If districts provide intensive intervention in reading in the early grades, and comprehension instruction in the later grades, they can eliminate eight years of future special education needs. Effective reading intervention must combine general and special education efforts, and general education should take the lead. Teaching kids to read is the single best thing a district can do for them – it is also the best thing they can do to control long term costs.
Step 6: Build and maintain quality programs
Students with severe disabilities constitute a small portion of special education students, but account for about half of all special education spending in some districts, in part due to out-of-district placements. Districts can serve more kids in local classes by making them similar to the out-of-district programs in terms of class size, student-teacher ratios, and high quality support services such as autism specialists, certified Wilson reading teachers, ABA behavior specialists, social workers, and drug and alcohol counselors.
Rethinking Paraprofessionals
1. Make sure aides aren’t being assigned for the wrong reasons, such as parental pressure, teacher pressure or as a ‘fix’ that masks the root cause of a problem. For example, an aide might be assigned to a student who is prone to outbursts in class. A trained behaviorist might be able to design a behavior plan for student and teacher, codify the warning signs, and coach the teacher so that eventually an aide is no longer needed.
2. Be very specific about what a student needs. Is math a struggle? Provide an aide during math, but not for art, music and language arts. Is transitioning from home to school the problem? Provide the aide for two hours in the morning, and then let the aide help in another room later in the day.
3. Schedule most aides on a building-wide basis, not student-by-student.
The decision to add an aide to a student’s IEP is typically made independently of what other supports exist in the classroom or building. Some classes have two or even three aides because the IEP does not consider whether an aide is already in that classroom. In some cases, districts might assign aides to classes rather than to individual students, or use student teachers when available to avoid redundancy.
As one district increased its commitment to include students with moderate disabilities in the general education classroom, the cost of paraprofessionals jumped 48% in just two years. Formal requests were submitted for another 15% increase the next year. By implementing the three steps described above, costs actually decreased by 6% over the next two years; students got the support of a second adult in the classroom for some part of the day; the aides knew exactly why they were there; and children had greater opportunity to interact with peers. Parents and principals appreciated the more structured criteria, which eliminated the sense that “getting an aide” was arbitrary.
Step 7: Rethink the role and schedule of paraprofessionals
The use of paraprofessionals for inclusion remains very popular but it’s a big budget item and research tells us to be wary1. An aide can create a social barrier, stifling peer interaction and defeating one of the primary benefits of inclusion. What’s more, a 1:1 aide can decrease the instruction a student gets from the classroom teacher who thinks a student with an aide already has 100% of an adult’s time. This means that the students with the greatest needs get the least attention from the teacher certified in the subject matter. In the worst case, the aide actually does the work for the student under the guise of helping. Yes, some students absolutely need aides for health and safety reasons, but aides are not a panacea.
Step 8: Benchmark staffing levels and service levels
Requests for more staff can be difficult to assess. Benchmarking—the process of comparing how others do the same thing—is a powerful tool available to districts because it shows what is possible. When district “A” learns that district “B” solved the same problem by doing XY & Z, staff may start to think differently about a problem.
In one district, there were requests for more therapists and testers, but the district was already exceeding the like-community benchmarks by 25% and 15% respectively. Still, the staff was working long days.
The district found that the issue was poor scheduling. By centralizing scheduling under the responsibility of an administrator with authority to make changes and balance caseloads more fairly, the need for more staff was eliminated.
Benchmarking can also be used the help assess service levels. Teams of therapists can develop objective criteria that can help guide IEP teams in determining who gets services and how often. While decisions still must be made on an individual basis at the IEP meeting, these guidelines can help districts gauge appropriate levels of staffing and services.
Step 9: Create a team to manage special education transportation
Although transportation to out-of-district placements may vary from district to district, they often have one thing in common: a poor flow of information and a lack of business savvy about the routing process.
Districts can save money when people with the right skill set (purchasing, logistics or transportation routing) are part of the team. It also helps to have very detailed information. For example, instead of simply stating a start time, look for the earliest and latest possible start time. A 15- to 20-minute window can be the difference between sharing a ride or not.
Districts might find new vendors by looking near the destination rather than near the district itself, and can save money by working with nearby towns to schedule students going to the same out-of-district school. A short weekly information-sharing meeting can fine tune plans and guarantee dialogue. Districts can also use mapping software to plot out-of-district schools and their start times, and identify opportunities for saving money.
Step 10: Get others to pay
Over the last two decades, schools have been asked to address an ever-increasing number of social problems. Many of them have ended up as special education services, including drug and alcohol counseling, adaptive technology, and treatment for rage, depression or school phobia. Fortunately, many social service agencies, the federal government, and private health insurance can help pay for these services.
This 10-Step Process has made bad budgets better, and has helped many students stay in the community, learn to read and make other academic gains. At the same time, it has allowed district leaders to show taxpayers that they are doing everything possible to meet the needs of all children and live within their means.
1. Guidelines for selecting alternatives to over reliance on paraprofessionals by Giangreco and Broer, US Office of Special Education, March 2003.
