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***Delaware: 20% of kids are SPED; official wants to know why all the autism

Feb 7, 2019, Delaware Public Media: Dept. of Ed says more money needed for rise in special needs students https://www.delawarepublic.org/post/dept-ed-says-more-money-needed-rise-special-needs-students Gov. John Carney proposes spending $1.56 billion on education in Fiscal Year 2020, a more than 5 percent increase over last year. Delaware’s increasing number of special education students is helping drive its rising education costs. School districts are seeing more children diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. JFC Co-chair Quinn Johnson says he wants to know the cause. “Is it our identification processes has improved such and those children always existed and we didn’t identify them," he said. "Or are we having actually some sort of problem that is actually causing children to be autistic?” In September 2018, Delaware had about 116,260 students in regular classes and about 23,400 in special education classes. [20% in SPED] Almost all of the growth in student population last year was in special needs students….
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