Vermont: 20% of education funding goes to special ed; parents worry it isn't enough
- The end of childhood
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Oct 13, 2025, WCAX TV: Some Vt. families worry special ed students’ needs won’t be met
ESSEX, Vt. (WCAX) - What is the best way to deliver special education to students in Vermont and dole out the dollars?
About 20% of education funding in Vermont goes to special education, delivered mainly through individualized learning in general classrooms.
But some families worry the system doesn’t have the resources to meet their students’ needs.
At a coffee shop in Essex, Diego Rendon shows me pictures of his 5-year-old son.
“He loves the outside. If he could be outside all day, that would be great for him,” Rendon said.
“When he can’t defend himself, that’s our biggest concern there,” Rendon said. “If he’s going to have a specialized teacher follow him throughout the whole day, because that’s what he needs, he’s going to stand out. He can’t go to the lunchroom by himself. He needs someone to take him to the bathroom. I mean, that’s, everyone’s going to be aware of him.”
“You start to look at, OK, so do they need a pull-out? How much of a pull-out do they need? Do they need someone from outside the school district to come in and work with them? So, this is the type of conversation that will happen with the IEP team,” Lundeen said.
About 20% of education funding in Vermont goes to special education, delivered mainly through individualized learning in general classrooms.
But some families worry the system doesn’t have the resources to meet their students’ needs.
Diego Rendon/Parent: I first hope that they would talk to parents that have kids that need additional assistance to see how vast the issue is... It’s a wide spectrum of that where it would be hard for the school to fully cover that, and especially in a given year, with the rates of autism going up, the schools are going to struggle to cover the staff they have there.
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