Idaho is failing our students with special needs | Opinion

A new report from the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica is shining a light on a serious problem that most legislators and state officials would probably prefer be kept in the dark.

Parents of students with disabilities, such as dyslexia or autism, are increasingly having to file complaints with the state over their schools’ failure to educate their children, alleging districts are violating federal law.

And it turns out, most of the time, districts are breaking the law, according to reporting by the Idaho Statesman’s Becca Savransky.

Idaho has one of the highest rates of founded complaints per capita in the nation, according to the story. Over the past five years, more than 70% of the complaints filed in Idaho found that districts had broken the law.

The root of the problem is the usual suspect: money. Specifically, not enough money.

That’s because the state distributes funding based on a flat percentage and not the actual number of students with disabilities in each district.

The decades-old funding formula assumes a set percentage of students in every district would qualify for special education: 6% in elementary school and 5.5% in middle and high school.

It’s arbitrary and woefully inadequate. Officials said they don’t know how lawmakers first arrived at that formula.

According to the most recent data, about 12% of students in Idaho qualify for special education services.

The situation would be infuriating even if it were a new problem.

But Idaho’s situation has been a problem for years.

Idaho’s Office of Performance Evaluations, an independent oversight agency, told Idaho officials in 2009 to consider tying special education funding to the actual cost of educating those students. The office came out with a report with the same findings again in 2016.

Still, nothing has been done.

And the problem has only gotten worse.

“That 5.5 and that 6%, which was already insufficient back in 2016, is even more insufficient,” Casey Petti, from the Office of Performance Evaluations, told the Statesman.

What’s the shortfall?

An independent oversight office this year estimated the gap to be over $80 million.

Put another way, an additional $80 million could solve the problem.

Unfortunately, Idaho legislators have continued, year after year, to ignore the problem.

Rather than increase funding for special education programs by $80 million, legislators such as Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, and Sen. Lori Den Hartog, R-Nampa, have been busy securing $50 million of taxpayer money for school vouchers for private schools.

Instead of securing taxpayer funding for a separate school system, they should have been working on fixing the very real problem of providing special education for those who need it in the public education system — the very system they’re constitutionally obligated to provide.

Further, $80 million is a drop in the bucket compared with the $4.6 billion in tax cuts and rebates the Idaho Legislature has approved in recent years.

Surely, legislators could have found $80 million to adequately fund special education.

And if you think it doesn’t affect you because you don’t have a child with special needs, think about this: For every dollar a school spends on special education that it doesn’t receive from the state, that’s one less dollar it has to spend on your child.

Unlike private schools, public schools can’t turn anyone away for any reason. Public schools must serve all children, sometimes creating a massive gap between what districts spend on special education and what the state allocates.

For example, the Lapwai school district spent an estimated $1.1 million on special education but received just $242,000 from the state, accoding to data from the Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations.

That’s $860,000 the district could have spent elsewhere. And for a small rural school district like Lapwai, that’s a lot of money.

That’s a lot of money that the state should be providing.

No more excuses, Idaho Legislature. No more kicking the can down the road. Fix it.

It’s your constitutional obligation.

Statesman editorials are the opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members John Hess, Debbie McCormick and Julie Yamamoto.