Special education shortfall has districts banding together

Angelique Flores

School districts across Orange County met last week to coordinate

education and lobbying efforts for special education funding. The

districts are following advice from a grand jury report released in

April, which found that the federal government is not fulfilling its

promise to pay 40% of special education costs.

Though the school districts have done informal lobbying with legislation

in the past, the grand jury report recommended a formal cooperative plan

among all the school districts. The report also said that districts

should make parents, staff and the general public aware that the

government isn’t providing sufficient funding to special education.

The meeting was a first step, and officials said the districts have made

no formal plans yet about cooperative lobbying.For 25 years, the

government has never given more than 13% to fund special education,

usually giving an average of 8%, said Huntington Beach City School

District Supt. Duane Dishno.

This past year, officials said Huntington Beach Union High School

District was shortchanged $4 million, Huntington Beach City School

District $1.7 million, Fountain Valley School District $1.1 million, and Ocean View School District $550,000.

“We’re getting 8% of the money. That’s nothing,” Ocean View School

District Supt. James Tarwater said.

Funding has remained constant but hasn’t kept up with the increasing

costs and need for services, said Steve McMahon, Fountain Valley School

District’s superintendent of business administration.

The districts cover the government’s shortfalls by using money from their

general funds, which takes away from education in general.

“It pits regular students against the special education ones,” Huntington

Beach Union High School District Supt. Susan Roper said.

Officials said having to cover the programs’ costs forces districts to

cut from other things such as reading programs, counseling, staffing and

class reduction up to grades eight.

“If I didn’t have to fork it over for this, we’d use it for basic skill

teachers to work with at-risk kids, art teachers, all the computers my

schools would want, interactive television programming... the list just

goes on and on,” said Dishno, whose district could use the money to match

the state funds they need to pay for school repairs and modernization.

Special education serves ages 3 to 21 and can cost three times more than

education for other students, which is about $4,100 per person a year,

Tarwater said. And the costs of the program are rising.

“We try to find the money somewhere. We never tell anybody, we just do

it,” Dishno said.

Officials estimate it has cost the county’s 27 districts more than $70

million over the past 25 years to cover the shortfall in special

education funding.