San Diego: 'Unsustainable' explosion in SPED; by 2035, 25% of students will have special needs

June 17, 2026,  Districts Are Buckling Under a Huge Spike in Special Ed Students  | Voice of San Diego

Over the past decade, the number of students with disabilities in American schools has exploded. In San Diego County, the trend has been particularly acute.  

In 2015, La Mesa Spring Valley Schools, for example, served 1,424 students with disabilities. By 2025, that number had increased to 2,225. That striking increase came even as the number of overall students in the district dropped significantly.

Over just a few years, more than one in five students had become legally entitled to special education services in the district.  

The same trend has played out countywide. Since 2015, local schools have lost tens of thousands of students. But over the same period, the number of students with disabilities has increased significantly. Special education students now make up almost 20 percent of students countywide – significantly more than a decade ago.  

If the trends continue at the same pace as the last decade, students with disabilities would make up 25 percent of the student population by 2035. 

The trend has been devastating to districts’ bottom lines. School districts are funded based on the number of children they educate. That means when they have fewer students, both the state and federal government send them less money.  , , ,

There are a slew of factors driving the increases in special ed enrollment.  

One big reason: the definitions of some disabilities have expanded, meaning a whole new slate of kids now meet the criteria to be considered disabled. Other reasons are societal, like the lingering impacts of the pandemic on kids’ mental health and a broader destigmatization of disabilities. Educators also greatly worry that many children are being misidentified as having a disability.  

In any case, for many districts, the situation has reached a crisis point.  

“I don’t think any district is going to be able to sustain the pace of growth and the lack of funding,” said Deann Ragsdale, the assistant superintendent of education services at La Mesa-Spring Valley Schools. “We don’t make decisions based on pocketbooks, we make decisions based on what kids need, but somewhere, something has to give.”

The Special Education Boom  

Those on the front lines of education say a swirl of issues has contributed to the new reality. 

One reason is cultural. Being diagnosed with a disability has become much less stigmatized than in past years, said Tom Bevilacqua, the assistant Superintendent of South Bay Union School District. Over the past decade, the percentage of kids with disabilities at his district has nearly doubled, increasing to almost one in four students.

“There’s a lot more awareness that it’s okay that we learn differently, and it’s okay that a student may have a disability, it doesn’t identify who they are. It’s just a component of each of us,” Bevilacqua said. 

Other reasons are more concrete and procedural. Schools have become much better at identifying kids with disabilities. That’s true across all of the 13 disabilities that qualify a student for special education services, from kids with visual impairments to those with an intellectual disability.  

That’s partly because new laws, like early reading screeners, have forced educators to identify kids more proactively.  

Beyond the procedural, definitional changes have also significantly increased the number of kids who qualify for services. Autism is the clearest example of these changes. While the diagnosis was once only used to describe cases of severe disability, it now includes a wide spectrum of neurological conditions. 

That broadened definition has meant that in recent years, an entirely new group of youngsters have received a diagnosis, translating to a nearly 300 percent increase in the number of kids with autism over the past two decades. That rise in diagnoses is primarily due to an increase in mild cases.  

While increasing rapidly, kids with autism only represent about 15 percent of total students receiving services under IDEA. Students with specific learning disabilities, other health impairments or speech or language impairments make up the largest percentage – accounting for about two thirds of total students receiving special education services nationwide. Growth in those three categories, though has been slow compared to autism and some other diagnoses. 

Then, there’s Covid. The pandemic significantly sped up the growth of the number of students with disabilities. In the five years after Covid shut down schools, 50 percent more local students were identified as needing services than in the five years prior.    . . .

But, she said, Covid is only part of the story.  

“A massive reason for some of the ballooning numbers and needs are because of this really, really intense mental health pandemic for our young people,” Burton said. “It started before Covid and got worse afterwards.” 

Essentially, Burton and other educators say they’ve seen students’ mental health has steadily deteriorated over the past decade plus. Exactly what’s behind that isn’t clear, though there’s been plenty of speculation that the proliferation of screens and similar technology is part of the picture. Those concerns have helped give rise to nationwide pushback to screens in classrooms.  Mental health issues writ-large aren’t typically IDEA-qualifying disabilities, but things like depression and anxiety do have the potential to exacerbate learning disabilities. And thanks to a 2011 California law, the responsibility of treating mental health concerns shifted from county offices of education to local school districts – meaning districts must pony up for those services as well.  

But to some educators, like Cajon Valley Union School District Superintendent David Miyashiro, an oft-whispered, but largely unproven, concern is also playing a role – the overidentification of kids with disabilities. . . .  

In the past decade, the number  of kids with disabilities at Cajon Valley has exploded, increasing by about 87 percent, from 1,712 kids to 3,198.

Miyashiro thinks overidentification is especially common for a new addition to the public school system: 4-year-olds, who’ve flooded into public schools since the creation of transitional kindergarten. Those students have helped offset declines in enrollment, but they’ve also come with significant new challenges educators aren’t fully prepared to address or even identify.  

“When we lower the start age to 4 years old, the number of students with significant behaviors increases because they’re still toddlers to some degree,” Miyashiro said. “They present significant needs and have learning gaps, but they’re not necessarily kids that are disabled. But because there’s such need, lots of districts are identifying them, I think, inappropriately.” 

The Funding Squeeze 

For many districts, the crisis is felt most acutely in their budgets. The fiscal crunch manifests in a couple of different ways. 

For one, as the total number of students declines, districts are given less funding. Then, with less money coming in, the number of kids with disabilities they serve has increased. That’s a problem, because the cost of special education services is steep.  

Cajon Valley, for example, spends nearly three times as much to educate a student with disabilities compared to a student who doesn’t receive special education services.

But districts also often point to another pair of culprits: state and federal officials, who they say have long underfunded special education. They have a point.  

As part of the passage of the IDEA in 1975, the feds promised to fund 40 percent of the average per-pupil cost of educating kids with disabilities. But in the five decades since its passage, they’ve never gotten close.   . . .

Back in December, officials at San Diego Unified went on the offensive. As part of a larger effort to redesign the district’s special education program, Superintendent Fabiola Bagula announced the district was mobilizing a coalition of districts to pressure state and federal officials to pitch in more money.  

Bagula said special education services cost the district about $400 million per year, but the district only received about $125 million from state and federal sources. That left them to fill in the $275 million gap with general fund dollars. 

“If we received the 40 percent we were promised, our district wouldn’t even have a budget deficit. Our children would have early interventions and we would be able to meet the needs of our families and our students in a very different way,” Bagula said.  . . .

The sheer number of kids qualifying for services also means that general education teachers are routinely entering classrooms filled with students who have IEP’s. That’s required leaders to provide ongoing training to help teachers adapt. 

“Teacher burnout’s a real thing. They need the support and the skills to really understand the needs of every child in their classroom. It’s not easy,” Ragsdale said.  . . .

 “Our ed specialists are getting unsustainable caseloads, unsustainable paperwork, and are then expected to co-teach, do IEPs, do all of this data, and then still come to work and like their job and have work-life balance,” Barrett said. “It’s unsustainable. It’s crushing teachers and making them leave the profession in droves.”