Texas: Number of SPED students has doubled over past 10 yrs

Oct 28, 2026, Meeting students’ needs | News | southtexasnews.com

Granbury ISD states that providing appropriate educational opportunities for all of its students is a primary mission of the district, and that includes students who are challenged by various disabilities.

During the October meeting of the GISD Board of Trustees, Tamara Hudson, director of special programs for the district, provided an overview of special education programs for GISD.

Hudson said there were 1,431 students served through the district’s special education programs as of mid October, and noted there are 13 categories recognized as qualifying for special education services.

The TEA’s website on special education lists the categories established as disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act as: autism, being deaf/blind, being deaf only or hard of hearing, emotional disability, intellectual disability, multiple disabilities, orthopedic impairment, other health impairment, specific learning disabilities, speech impairment, traumatic brain injury, visual impairment, and developmental delay. . . .

The most common disability is dyslexia, she said, which can affect reading, writing, speaking and/or the ability to do math. . . .

With “1,431 students served (in special education programs) in Granbury ISD and a couple hundred already in referral for this year, it takes a lot of staff to serve this number of kids,” Hudson said.

On GISD campuses, there are 204 staff members, “including teachers and paraprofessionals that are serving students on IEPs,” she said. In addition, students are served by diagnosticians and therapists. . . .

 “We’ve always had students with significant behavioral concerns but that seems to be increasing,” Hudson said. She added that it also seems to reflect an influx of additional behavioral concerns in society, “not necessarily the severity but just the number of kids that have those concerns.”

Response includes “setting up different types of classrooms to address those concerns” and working closely with the Region Education Service Center to properly manage behavioral issues, Hudson said.

In the last 10 years, the number of special education students “has doubled in the state of Texas,” she said.  “We have gone from just about 400,000 students identified as special education to almost 1 million, and that takes a lot of staff.”

The emphasis of special education is helping students to improve “academically, behaviorally and functionally,” Hudson said.