Connecticut: 100,000 students have special needs; nearly one in every five

July 6, 2026, CT Insider: Nearly 1 in 5 CT students receives special education services

Connecticut is serving more special education students than ever before – a rise that has rippled across the state’s education system and into classrooms, budgets and families.

As more students require services, schools are strained by staffing shortages, disparities in resources and rising costs – leaving families to navigate an often complicated, uneven process that experts say may not serve all students equally.

Together, those pressures are testing a special education system stretched to support nearly 100,000 students.  

Connecticut had around 68,500 special education students in 2006-07 and around 95,000 in 2025-26, even as total public school enrollment fell from 578,500 to slightly below 498,000 in that same time frame.

About 19% of students were classified as having special education status in the 2025-26 school year, compared to less than 12% in 2006-07, according to statewide data. . . .

Connecticut

Some students with disabilities in private education may be included in these proportions, depending on whether they are served through IDEA, a federal law that mandates students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate public education. 1990 is the first year that autism was included in the data. Data was not available between 1990 and 2005 and for some states for some years.

What’s behind the rise?

Explaining why this is happening is not easy.

 “I don’t think anyone has a clear explanation for the growth that we’ve seen,” said Patrice McCarthy, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education.

Instead, experts paint a more complicated picture – shaped by better identification, evolving evaluation practices and a broader understanding of disabilities.

One of the biggest, they say, is that students who might once have been overlooked are now being identified.

“I can say, as a psychologist, as a provider, what we are diagnosing now and what we were diagnosing 20 years ago are very different,” said Mark Palmieri, a licensed psychologist and behavior analyst and co-executive director of The Center for Children with Special Needs. “It's a more diverse array of students with complex needs that we as a community are much more sensitive to.” . . .

Connecticut's proportion of students with learning disabilities rose from one of the lowest to one of the highest in the U.S. Its proportion of students with autism or other health impairments, such as ADHD, remained high.

However, experts cautioned that higher identification does not necessarily mean disabilities themselves are becoming more common.

In Palmieri’s eyes, we've made a clear shift in our knowledge, sensitivity and sophistication of understanding what developmental and learning delays look like. 

“Students who would never have been identified in the past are now reaching identification,” Palmieri said. “... Those kids were all there, but was anyone looking and saying, ‘What's going on for you that's making you have real difficulty getting through this class?’”

Aimee Turner, president of the Connecticut Council of Administrators of Special Education (ConnCASE), agrees that advancements in research and science played a role. “I think we're just having a deeper understanding of the brain and of how students learn and the impact of some of the processing pieces, so that definitely impacts a piece of it.”

Teachers, parents, pediatricians and other professionals working with children seem increasingly better able to tell when a child may need testing or extra support, they said. . . .

As awareness has increased and stigma around disabilities has decreased, Palmieri said more families are requesting evaluations and extra support earlier.

He and other experts said autism is one of the clearest examples of how changing definitions, research and greater understanding can affect identification rates.

“I think there's a broader definition of what autism is, and I think that it was always a spectrum, but I think that spectrum has grown, and I think that widening of the spectrum has definitely impacted the number of individuals receiving supports for that,” Turner said. . . .

And as the clinical definitions and knowledge about disabilities like autism and dyslexia have advanced over the years, so have the evaluations for students in schools, Turner said.

“We're just more adept at evaluation and diagnosing students,” she said. “I think there are many more evaluations that hit into real nuanced areas of students, in the past we may have seen something just as a weakness, and now we really can dig deep into why there's a deficit.”

A strained system

The challenge in getting students with special needs the services they need is very real, for both families and school districts, Palmieri said.

“Oftentimes we have families that say, ‘Well, the school said, yeah, they understand, but they just don't have the resources to do that. What do we do now?’” he said. “And that's a very difficult situation .... Boy, is it nearly the number one stressor that we hear about from school teams and families alike.”

Districts are legally required to provide special education services to qualifying children with disabilities in their districts, and strict guidelines ensure they are educated in the least restrictive environment, said ConnCASE executive director Yvette Goorevitch. The least restrictive environment refers to the legal standard in which a student with a disability must be educated alongside their nondisabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate. . . .

In the latest budget season, school leaders, educators, students and local officials consistently rallied for more funding at the state level, citing rising district costs — for which special education can be a key driver. In some districts, officials have estimated that special education costs account for a third of their districts' budgets.

“Funding and resourcing our schools is a terrible challenge, and I don't know one school team who I work with isn't struggling with lack of staff, lack of resources, lack of time to achieve everything that they need,” Palmieri said.

For many Connecticut school districts, special education costs are a major financial pressure – as student needs and costs rise faster than funding, leaving districts to sort out budget deficits.

“The cost to educate a child with a very complex, challenging, significant disability is very high,” Goorevitch said. “When a child, for example, moves into a district with a very intense program, it can cause a small district to have to go back and ask for a major revision of hundreds of thousands of dollars in their budget.” . . .