Virginia places more students with disabilities outside their local public schools than 37 other states — a trend that has dramatically increased spending on specialized private schools over the past decade. Private day schools are specialized institutions for children that typically have an emotional disturbance, autism, or some other childhood mental disorder, and exhibit behaviors that public schools have difficulty managing. JLARC predicts that if spending trends continue, within the next several years, the majority of state special education expenditures will be for private day school services. To get to the core of this issue we must first look at the Children’s Services Act (CSA), which administers through the Office of Children’s Services (OCS) funding for the highest-need, most intensive special education services.
The children CSA serves are identified using two broad categories: “mandated” and “non-mandated.” The CSA program must cover these “mandated” children at a “sum sufficient” level, meaning the program must pay for the entire cost of services even if it exceeds budget. The problem, however, lies in the fact that the CSA funding pool is limited to use only in private day schools. As such, instead of drawing from OCS funds, public school divisions are forced to rely on state and federal special education dollars, which have been on a steady decline. Divisions have little financial incentive to serve more at-risk special needs students in public schools, even if that is their least restrictive environment (LRE), because of the high cost burden. Virginia’s funding policies don’t encourage public schools to develop their own capacity to serve higher-need students and, instead, motivate them to place students out of public school into private day schools, exhausting CSA funding. In the past year, legislation has been created to have the CSA funding cover the additional services required for a successful transition from a private day school back to a public school for up to a year after the transition—ensuring students are staying in a more costlier, restrictive environment for only as long as necessary.
In the HB 2117 workgroup, the issue of what CSA funding should cover is at the heart of conversation. Among many recommendations, the most agreed upon was this: a separate pool of funding should be created apart from CSA within OCS (or the VDOE if the funding pool transfers) for public schools to utilize for students with severe disabilities. This would enable students to remain in their least restrictive environment (LRE), which for most, is public school. The vessel by which this defined fund would be administered is yet to be determined, but the frontrunners are 1) expanding Students with Intensive Support Needs Application (SISNA), which currently serves children in six disability categories, to encompass additional categories of disabilities or 2) creating a whole new funding pool. What this additional appropraition will entail will be discussed in the next meeting.
With JLARC’s report on education funding coming out in December and our final workgroup meeting this Friday, I look forward to getting insight into where the optimal funding structure for special education lies.
