Special Education
Laws & News
Across the States
KS: Kansas sees 12,000 special education student rise in past decade
The Beacon
There were 82,000 special education students in Kansas public schools in 2024-2025. That’s 12,000 more than a decade ago. The 12,000-student increase is not a massive share of the 500,000 students in Kansas public schools. But the steady increase in special education students is making more demands on already overworked teachers. “We are feeling that as a district,” said Ryan Alliman, executive director of student support services at Wichita Public Schools. The increase contributes to a broader trend in education. Teachers are handling more students with less help, leading to longer days and more stressful work. Districts are trying to hire additional staff, but they can’t find qualified applicants. It’s a cycle that leads to burnout.
OR: Parents oppose cuts to services for disabled children in Central Oregon
The Bulletin
A group of parents, caregivers, and teachers of special needs children asked the High Desert Education Service District to reconsider budget cuts Tuesday night that would decrease services their children rely on while attending Central Oregon schools. High Desert ESD board members answered questions about funding and acknowledged parents’ concerns, but ultimately passed the budget. If the budget was not passed by June 30, the regional service provider, which provides specialists for disabilities, early intervention, and early childhood education for children through age 5 and more, would run the risk of not having any funding at all. The district’s 2025-26 $90.6 million budget is 2% less than its 2024-25 budget, and it anticipates a 22% reduction in federal grants.
PA: 5 Central Bucks School District staff members in Doylestown, Pennsylvania fired after investigation into alleged abuse
ABC7 Chicago
A Pennsylvania school board voted Wednesday night to terminate five of its staff members after an investigation uncovered alleged abuse inside a special education classroom. In April, Central Bucks School District Superintendent Steven Yanni was placed on leave following a report from the nonprofit, Disability Rights Pennsylvania. It accused Yanni and several other administrators of misleading police and parents about the child abuse allegations. According to the report released, students were physically restrained, water intake was restricted, a student was found naked, and physical punishment was used inside an autism support classroom at Jamison Elementary. The alleged abuse happened from September to December of 2024. The Bucks County District Attorney’s Office has said it does not consider this a criminal matter. So far, no charges have been filed against anyone involved.
TN: Tennessee Board of Education considering rule change for students with disabilities placements
Chalkbeat
Tennessee may soon make it easier for schools to temporarily remove some students with disabilities from their classrooms. The proposed rule being considered by the Tennessee Board of Education would amend existing guidelines to allow schools to move a student deemed a “disruptive force” to a more restrictive environment before they’re evaluated in a functional behavioral assessment. A 2022 state rule requires schools to perform these formal assessments, which identify behavioral causes and guide behavior intervention plans, when a student has exhibited dangerous or highly disruptive behavior. The proposal has cautious support from disability advocates, who acknowledge that the rule guidance could be needed to allow schools to safely educate students. But they caution that the move should be a carefully considered option, not the norm.
TX: Lawmakers failed kids with disabilities, advocates say
The Texas Tribune
Texas lawmakers this year added $100 million to a scholarship fund to help families across the state pay for early child care, an extraordinary investment that may ease a waitlist to help thousands of children. However, advocates say legislators fell short in creating more opportunities for the state’s youngest living with disabilities. “Most families with children with disabilities are really struggling in one area, if not multiple,” said Bethany Edwards, director for research and evaluation at the Center for Transforming Lives, a North Texas nonprofit that helps single mothers. Edwards is also a parent of a child with disabilities. “And there’s a lot that can happen from a policy standpoint to change these systems, but change seems to happen very slowly,” she said. Expanding the state’s public preschool programs to children with disabilities and incentives for more and better training for child care workers were among the proposals that fell short this year. Texas lawmakers ended the legislative session on June 2.
TX: Texas bill establishes program to support students with intellectual, developmental disabilities
The Daily Texan
After he graduated from high school in Temple, Texas, Aidan Guerra, who has autism, said he had three options: get a job, go back to school, or move out. Guerra wanted to attend UT like his siblings did. He said his mother wanted to find a way for Guerra to go to school after graduation and receive the same support he had in high school. His family found the solution in E4Texas, a three-semester program at the Texas Center for Disability Studies, which combines classroom, career, and independent living instruction to help students with or without a disability find employment. On May 3, he became one of the 67 students who have graduated from the program since it began in 2018. “E4Texas gave me a chance to go to my dream school and learn how to live on my own to build a future,” Guerra said. On May 26, Texas House Bill 2081 was signed into law, establishing the Building Better Futures Program.
WA: Child rights advocates New WA school discipline rules roll back protections
Public News Service
Washington’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction has revised its public school discipline policies, and advocates for children said the changes weaken student protections, and OSPI did not seek enough community feedback. One of the new rules removes requirements for schools to consider alternative forms of discipline before suspensions or expulsions. Derick Harris, executive director of the Black Education Strategy Roundtable, said that since Black students are twice as likely to face disciplinary actions compared with white students, they will be unfairly affected by the change. “This appears to me to be some rollback to a bygone era of zero-tolerance policy,” Harris contended. Eric Holzapfel, chief engagement officer for the League of Education Voters, criticized OSPI for doing only the bare minimum to engage the community about the new rules, arguing they did not give enough notice for the public hearings, and there were not enough of them.
LA: New Orleans Schools piloting shared services, tech for special ed
This fall a handful of New Orleans schools will have access to centralized special education services, the first step in an effort to help autonomous charter schools join forces to serve students with disabilities. The new program will provide participating schools with shared special education technology, services, and training. The first of its kind in the district, the opt-in program will be run by an “education service agency,” a public entity authorized by law to coordinate and provide services. The governance model is still being worked out, but eventually, an advisory board made up of representatives from the participating schools will oversee the program. The model is meant to make it easier for smaller and single-site charter schools to provide students with disabilities a range of specialized services, which can be financially and logistically challenging, and equalize special education access across the district.
MT: Montana’s new law brings funding for early special education
NBC Montana
A new law will bring funding to early special education in Montana for the first time in decades. The bipartisan effort got House Bill 168 onto Governor Greg Gianforte’s desk, and now, it’s law. According to federal law, all school districts in the nation are required to educate preschool-age children with disabilities. The Treasure State is no different, but since 1993, schools haven’t received any funding to provide those services. “Over the years, various school funding reforms, all well-intentioned and generally good, kind of an unintended effect seemed to be that those three and four-year-olds kind of fell off the radar,” said Rep. Jonathan Karlen, D-Missoula. The legislation, sponsored by Karlen, addresses the long-standing gap in Montana’s education system. While school districts have been federally required to provide special education services to preschool-aged children, the state has not allocated funding to support those efforts. This left local districts to either scale back essential services or reallocate funds from other K-12 programs to meet students’ needs.
NE: How Nebraska is reimagining special education — and seeing promising results
Hechinger Report
When Bethany Jolliffe started teaching kindergarten 15 years ago, she picked up on what seemed like a long-standing pattern: Teachers mostly stayed in their lane, with general education teachers focusing on “their” students, and special education teachers homed in on students deemed to be their responsibility. Instead of keeping children with disabilities in classrooms and bringing help to them, teachers often pulled them out of the classroom, away from their peers. Nationwide, that’s a common approach in schools, where many students with disabilities, starting in kindergarten, are segregated from their classmates for large portions of the day. At Westmoor Elementary in west Scottsbluff, where Jolliffe is now assistant principal, that’s no longer the case. In classrooms across the school, children of all abilities learn side by side. Scottsbluff and many other communities across Nebraska have joined a statewide effort over the past few years to include more children with disabilities in general education classrooms for the majority of the day.