OREGON: Number of students with autism doubled in 15 yrs.; SPED up threefold

Mar 22, 2025, MSN: Funding for special education steps into the spotlight in Salem

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/education-and-learning/special-education/funding-for-special-education-steps-into-the-spotlight-in-salem/ar-AA1z70jj?ocid=BingNewsVerp&apiversion=v2&noservercache=1&domshim=1&renderwebcomponents=1&wcseo=1&batchservertelemetry=1&noservertelemetry=1 

For years, Oregon special education advocates have tried but failed to persuade lawmakers to grant school districts more money for the costs of educating the roughly 80,000 students who need individualized help during the school day because of a physical, emotional or learning disability.

The efforts have gone nowhere even as the number of students qualifying for special education services rose sharply. Lawmakers instead focused on pumping up per-student spending overall and letting districts decide how to deploy it.

Now special education funding is back in the spotlight at the Legislature, thanks to a full court press from heavyweight groups including the Oregon Education Association and the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators.

Under its current system, Oregon pays districts twice as much per pupil for a special education student as for a non-disabled one but limits the number who can qualify for double funding to 11% of a district’s overall student body, a metric set in the 1990s. This year, the state pays an extra $9,620 for each of those students, according to the Oregon Department of Education’s school finance expert, Mike Wiltfong.

But statewide, school districts have determined about 14.5% of students qualify for such help, which can range from weekly meetings with a speech pathologist to daily literacy tutoring sessions to combat dyslexia to bell-to-bell care from a one-on-one aide for students with especially high needs.

Districts say those costs can cannibalize funding available for the rest of the student body. (Districts with students who have particularly high needs, costing more than $30,000 a year for a single student, have access to a separate fund to help cover those bills. But it too has limits: $55 million is available per year.)

The number of Oregon students with autism diagnoses has doubled in the last 15 years, and the number of young children diagnosed with developmental delays have gone up threefold, Wiltfong told the House Education Committee Wednesday.

Advocates want to raise the 11% cap to 15%. In his testimony, Wiltfong said allowing more students to qualify for double funding should bring an increase in funding of about $376 million.

One reason that the 11% rate has stayed steady for so long, Wiltfong acknowledged during Wednesday’s hearing, is that previous generations of lawmakers feared “overidentification” — districts qualifying more students than actually need special education services to draw the maximum allowable state funding.

In Oregon, no one checks to see that the extra funding districts receive for special education students – or for students navigating poverty or learning English as a second language or any other special category – is actually spent on those students versus spent on general education costs.

Gov. Tina Kotek has already proposed a meaningful boost of around $1.1 billion to school funding for the coming two years, for a total of $11.3 billion for the state school fund. . . .