[A] bill that would make sweeping changes in how the state pays for and delivers special education, which was approved by the House in a unanimous vote last week, has already gotten a chillier reception in the Senate.
The bill, H.897, which shifts the funding of special education from a reimbursement model to a census-based model — one based on the total student enrollment in a school district — won the praise of the chair of the House Education Committee, Rep. David Sharpe, D-Bristol, who said it would better serve both students identified as special needs, qualifying for an Individualized Educational Program, or IEP, and students who are simply struggling more than others. “It increases outcomes for students that need extra support and special education students, it is better for all students,” Sharpe said.
Rep. Kate Webb, D-Shelburne, also a member of the House Education Committee, said the bill was bigger than Act 46, the school governance reform bill passed in 2015 that has resulted in a rewrite of the map of the state’s school districts.
The Senate Committee on Education, now deliberating the merits of H. 897, has not displayed the same enthusiasm.
Sen. Philip Baruth, D/P-Chittenden, while a big fan of Act 46, a law he has protected since taking over as chair of the education committee, said he had concerns about the House approach to special education, and that he would be approaching it from a “place of skepticism.”
Providing school districts with what is essentially unrestricted funding for struggling students is too broad, Baruth said. “A school could end up using it for all sorts of things unrelated to students with special needs,” he said.
Baruth said the committee would focus on balancing the needs of “special needs” students with those of struggling students who for one reason or another don’t quality for an IEP.
But the scope of the bill, Baruth said, needed to be narrower, with more guardrails in place. As it is now, he said, the bill is designed for a whole range of students, from those who may perform well in most subjects but need a reading tutor all the way to students requiring more intensive and specialized educational help.
The House bill creates a new funding formula for special education, in which funding would be based on total student enrollment. The so-called census model would be phased in over five years. During that time, school districts would be expected to adopt best practices detailed in a report by the District Management Group, a Massachusetts consultancy.
Baruth said his fear that districts might use this new freedom to fund a new roof, or pay for deferred maintenance.
“School districts are always at their wits end for funding and if there are zero restrictions on this money it will seep away into other things,” Baruth said. “That is just physics.”
The point of shifting from a reimbursement funding model to a census based model is that it would free up teachers to help struggling students while avoiding the excessive red tape that goes with identifying students for specialized educational services.
Baruth says some of that tape is necessary. “The red tape is there to protect kids with special needs,” he said. “If we get rid of the red tape it’s great for everybody except families with kids with IEP.”
Sen. Becca Balint, D-Brattleboro, vice chair of the Senate education committee, said she would prefer it if best practices were phased in first, followed by changes in funding. Otherwise, she said, “I feel like it’s putting the cart before the horse.”
There is a provision in the House bill allowing supervisory unions that have been working with the District Management Council — the districts were part of a pilot program to test the new practices — to implement the new law immediately. An advisory council would work closely with the districts, and then make recommendations on applying the new practices to the rest of the state’s districts.
Among Baruth’s objections was the size of the advisory council, which has been designed to have 17 members.
Baruth said it may be that what is needed is more time to implement the changes. If the timeline for implementation were extended a year, he said, it would give everyone a time to come up with the right balance, one that would allow schools to help struggling students in the general population, while also seeing to the needs of special education students.
“It will have to be a balancing act,” he said. “The House bill imagines a timeline of four or five years.”
He suggested that if the effective date were delayed a year, it would allow time to come up with the right formula. “And it may be, if the work isn’t done, we have to come back at it next year,” he said.
