Vermont “needs intervention” to adequately meet the requirements of federal disability law, the U.S. Department of Education said this week, and the state could lose access to some special education funding if schools are not able to show improvement in the next few years.
The department reviews each state’s compliance with the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act annually to see if schools are meeting student needs according to the landmark civil rights law.
The federal government’s analysis for the 2018-19 school year said Vermont missed the mark on several fronts – support for students with disabilities transitioning out of high school, the length of time it took to resolve complaints, and poor performance on standardized tests for students with disabilities. The department also noted difficulties with consistent and timely data reporting.
Marilyn Mahusky, a staff attorney at Vermont Legal Aid’s Disability Law Project, called the federal review “important” but said its results were “not entirely surprising.”
“We’ve heard complaints about transition services, in particular, for some time – parents feel the supports are meaningless and don’t adequately prepare students for their futures,” she said.
The Green Mountain State is an outlier among the country’s education systems. Just New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands received the same determination, and the U.S. territory Palau and the Bureau of Indian Education were the only U.S. school systems to be assigned more severe statuses.
Twenty-two states and territories are meeting the law’s requirements, according to the Department of Education, and another 33 received a lesser status of concern. If Vermont remains in its current status for three or more consecutive years, the federal government could withhold funds, according to the state’s Agency of Education.
Dan French, Vermont’s secretary of education, was not available for an interview Wednesday. But during a press conference with Gov. Phil Scott, he said that “the issues basically boiled down to data reporting, to a certain extent.”
“We are sort of digging our way out of several years of problems. But we have a good plan to do that and look forward to working with the federal government to ensure we have good oversight of our special ed system,” he added.
The agency has been repeatedly delayed in publicly releasing test scores over the last two years, and reports to the Legislature and State Board of Education have also regularly been late. The frequent delays in routine work prompted the lawmakers to hold a special hearing about the agency’s staffing, which has been cut by nearly a quarter since the Great Recession.
Erin Maguire, the director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the Essex-Westford School District, agreed that problems with data reporting are key, and expressed sympathy for the agency, which she said had been repeatedly “fleeced of positions” and unable to offer competitive salaries.
But Maguire, who is also the president of the Council of Administrators of Special Education, a national professional organization, was blunt that the state’s problems extend beyond technical compliance problems.
“Our student outcomes for special education in Vermont are not good,” she said.
Before the pandemic hit the state, schools were attempting to implement Act 173, a major reform passed by lawmakers in 2018 to overhaul special education funding and delivery. That effort has already been twice postponed – first by stakeholders, who argued a lack of capacity at the agency had left local districts ill-prepared to implement the law, and again by the coronavirus crisis.
The new law transitions Vermont to a block-grant system for funding special education, where, instead of being reimbursed for specific services, districts would receive money based on their overall head counts. But the law is also intended to shift how students are taught and included in the classroom, and to de-emphasize, in particular, the use of paraeducators.
Maguire echoed many critics of the law’s implementation, and said the state had spent too much time reforming the funding side of the equation, instead of focusing on better training the educators on the ground.
“It’s about teaching practice,” she said. “This is about instruction.”
