Following pushback from the field, the Vermont Agency of Education has said it’ll give local districts an extra year to adjust to tightened special education reimbursement rules.
In two memos sent out in early June, the agency had warned schools it would no longer pay districts back for certain special education costs beginning next year. State officials at the time said they were simply making sure local districts were brought back into compliance with long-standing regulations.
But several local school officials complained, saying they were taken aback by the state’s guidance – and particularly its late arrival. The new fiscal year started on July 1, and budgets were set in March during Town Meeting season. Local administrators reported that unreimbursed costs not accounted for in their budgets could climb into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Several education groups, in a letter to the agency, said they worried the state’s guidance conflicted with federal law, and also left local districts in a “cloud of uncertainty” over budgeting. The letter was signed by leaders of the state’s special education, school boards, principals, superintendents, and independent school associations.
A key concern was that the new guidance would require school districts to parse special education costs from regular education costs when asking the state to reimburse them for the tuition they pay to so-called private therapeutic schools. Both public and private school officials said making such a distinction would be strange, given that these schools delivered highly specialized programming.
“The reason that students are referred to those schools is that they need special education for everything,” Mill Moore, the executive director of the Vermont Independent Schools Association, said at the time.
In a communication sent to the state’s superintendents on Thursday, Secretary of Education Dan French acknowledged that “complying with the memos immediately will impose a hardship on FY20 budget and contract processes.”
“This was not the Agency’s intention, and we would like to mitigate the confusion and unforeseen budget impacts that some SD/SUs are currently experiencing,” it continues.
Both public and private school officials said they were glad for the extra year, and grateful that the agency had acknowledged how disruptive the timing of its June memos had been. But they also emphasized that state and local officials had more talking to do.
“I think that the question about what’s an eligible cost or not is still open and is going to require more work,” said Jeffrey Francis, the executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association.
Said Moore: “It’s a very good first step. And if we can talk to the special education experts in the agency about our point of view, maybe we can make some progress.”
