The Hechinger Report

There’s a half-billion-dollar federal program that is supposed to help students with disabilities get into the workforce when they leave high school, but most parents — and even some school officials — don’t know it exists. As a result, hundreds of thousands of students who could be getting help go without it. New Jersey had the nation’s lowest proportion — roughly 2 percent — of eligible students receiving these services in 2023. Only about 295,000 students in the whole country received some form of the services — out of an estimated 3.1 million who were eligible — in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. In New Jersey last year, that number was just 1,370 students out of more than 80,000 eligible. In New York, about 5 percent of eligible students got services.