Special Education
Laws & News
Across the States
ID: Idaho takes a $5 million step toward filling the special education funding gap
Union Bulletin
Idaho school districts will soon have a little help to serve students with disabilities. Gov. Brad Little on Friday signed legislation that finalizes a fund to provide money for school districts educating students with disabilities who need services that are costlier, like a nurse or an ASL interpreter. Under the bill, schools can tap into the fund when costs for educating a student exceed $30,000, and they have applied other resources, such as Medicaid. State Superintendent Debbie Critchfield championed the legislation. The bill is similar to one that lawmakers narrowly rejected last year, but one of the bill’s sponsors said this year’s version included changes to ensure transparency and accountability. The Legislature is appropriating $5 million in one-time funding to put toward the fund. Next year, legislators will have to decide whether to allocate additional money.
IL: Chicago Archdiocese accuses CPS of abruptly ending funding for students with disabilities
MSN.com
The Chicago Archdiocese is accusing Chicago Public Schools of abruptly pulling funding for students with disabilities in Catholic schools. Archdiocese officials said in a statement that Friday is suddenly the last day more than 800 students with disabilities will receive federally funded instructional support at their schools.
The archdiocese claims these programs were pulled only from Catholic schools, saying it is “not aware of any other non-public school system or individual school, religious or secular, whose IDEA services are being terminated.” IDEA stands for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which provides federal funding for services. Cardinal Blase Cupich blasted the city’s school district, writing in the statement, “We cannot allow this shocking and unjust action by CPS to stand, not only given its affront to Catholics, but even more so since that injustice disenfranchises the students we serve.”
But CPS disputed the church’s characterization of the situation. In a statement Friday afternoon, CPS officials said they have met regularly with the Archdiocese this academic year and repeatedly alerted Catholic school administrators that they were spending their federal funds too quickly and were on track to run out before the end of the school year.
LA: Federal Judge okays New Orleans charter school rejection of student with special needs
Forbes
Can a charter school pick and choose its students like a private school, or must it, like a public school, accept all students regardless of any special needs? A federal court judge has ruled that, at least in Louisiana, the charter school may “narrow” its applicant pool. The student, identified in court documents as O.E., applied for admission to The Willow School for the 2025-2026 school year, a well-regarded arts-based charter school in New Orleans. The nine-year-old boy has profound physical and intellectual disabilities and had received an Individualized Education Program (IEP) from the district where he previously lived.
NOLA Public Schools is a unique district in the country; only one of its schools is directly run by the board, while the rest are charter schools operated by charter management organizations. The Willow School requires students to meet certain eligibility requirements, including scoring at least the minimum on the Iowa Assessment. O.E. was unable to meet those requirements. His parents asked the school to waive the testing requirement; the school refused.
The ruling hangs in part on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires school districts to provide each and every student with a free appropriate public education (FAPE). O.E. argued that each charter school is essentially its own mini-district, responsible for providing FAPE for its students, and entrance requirements are an attempt to avoid that responsibility. But Papillion argues that the charter schools in the NOLA district (unlike charters in other districts) are part of that district, and a charter school has an obligation to provide FAPE only to those students who enroll in that charter.
LA: Mom of special ed student fights for fair dispute hearings
nola.com
When Christina Martin’s 9-year-old daughter Vinaya was diagnosed with a rare neurodevelopmental disorder and autism as a toddler, Martin was thrust into an unfamiliar world. In the years since, the Kenner parent has spent countless hours navigating the complexities of special education and learning the ins and outs of federal and state disabilities law. But even for a parent as knowledgeable and engaged as Martin, making sure her daughter receives the services she needs to excel in school still feels like an uphill battle. “When you’re constantly having to advocate, question decisions and just fight to be heard,” Martin said in a recent interview, “you start to realize that the system isn’t really built for us.” Now, Martin and other advocates are working with a state lawmaker to make it easier for parents to take action when they believe schools aren’t meeting their children’s needs.
The bill aims to shift the burden of proof in due process hearings from parents to schools, which would have to show that they provided the necessary services and support to students with disabilities. The House Education Committee approved the bill on Wednesday, sending it to the full House for a vote.
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LA: Louisiana parents could get more power in special education disputes
WWNO
A bipartisan bill that would make it easier for parents in Louisiana to win special education disputes has the full backing of the House education committee. When a parent believes their child’s public school isn’t providing the burden of proof, it is on the parent. It comes as parents must rely on state-level complaints due to federal cuts by the Trump administration. At Wednesday’s committee meeting, lawmakers and parents spoke in favor of HB 342, which would transfer the burden of proof to schools, as some states have already done. No one spoke against the bill. “The school districts hold all the power and all the information,” the bill’s author, Rep. Alonzo Knox, D-New Orleans, told lawmakers. Knox described the bill as a grassroots effort, “from the parents and kids themselves.”
Several mothers of students with special needs spoke in support, including Christina Martin of Jefferson Parish. “It ensures that decisions are based on the child, not on convenience, not on staffing, and not on a system that is already overwhelmed,” said Martin, who has a 9-year-old who has multiple disabilities and is non-speaking.
Last school year, out of more than 40 special education due-process complaints, only one was successful. It belonged to Kathryn Hart of Baton Rouge. “This imbalance is not just unfair. It prevents valid claims from ever being brought,” Hart said at Wednesday’s meeting.
NE: Lawmakers reject proposal to give more power to parents of special education students
Nebraska Public Media
In the Nebraska Legislature on Tuesday, senators rejected an attempt to give parents of special education students more power over their children’s education. Sen. Victor Rountree is the sponsor of the proposal to require that parents must approve any changes to a special education student’s individualized education program, or IEP. Rountree said the bill was brought to him by the Defense Department following complaints from military families that Nebraska schools sometimes denied their students services they had previously received in other states.
Rountree said he was trying to address a power imbalance between parents, who are often on their own, and schools, which have experts and lawyers on their side. “At the end of the day, this bill is about whether we believe parents matter, whether we believe their voices should carry equal weight, and whether we are willing to correct a system that, as it stands, too often leaves families without a meaningful path to advocate for their children,” Rountree said.
Sen. Bob Hallstrom opposed Rountree’s proposal, saying it went too far. “This amendment would expand consent requirements far beyond what is required by federal law, effectively giving parents veto power over every single decision made by educational experts for special education students,” Hallstrom said.
NH: Latest open enrollment bill clarifies special education protections
New Hampshire Public Radio
There is more clarity this week about the so-called open enrollment legislation that would allow New Hampshire students to attend public schools outside their districts. According to the state Department of Education, a student’s home district would still have to pay their special education costs if they enrolled outside the district. But their new district would have to cover the costs of accommodations required under a different disability protection known as Section 504. Those protections often relate to things like health conditions, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, vision needs, and emotional disturbances. The newest bill would also prohibit school districts from rejecting students for disciplinary issues if their infractions were related to a disability. Districts also would not be allowed to turn away students for chronic absenteeism if their absences were due to bullying or being homeless. During a hearing on Monday, Republican lawmakers said school districts could block non-resident students from enrolling by setting their “capacity” at zero. But they could not prohibit their students from enrolling in other districts.
NJ: ‘Perfect storm of awful’: Advocates call for probe of special-ed office
NJ Spotlight News
The state Office of Special Education doesn’t function as it should, families and some legislators say. Parents often don’t know that the office exists, and even when they do, they say it sometimes brushes off their requests to investigate issues. When the state does find in their favor, parents say, it may do little to fix the situation. And when a school district repeatedly offends, the state usually does not pursue systemic reform but instead sticks with case-by-case examinations.
Over the past two years, parents have sent nearly 3,000 requests to the Governor’s Office or its constituent relations team for information about the Office of Special Education. Many are now calling for an investigation of the agency, which is intended to protect the most vulnerable children. “It’s like a perfect storm of awful,” says Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia, a Republican from Sussex County who sits on the education committee. Districts deny care to contain costs, the state lacks the capacity to step in effectively, and families are stuck in the middle, she says.
CT: Blue Room: Restraining and secluding the state’s most vulnerable students
Inside Investigator
On May 20, 2024, teachers and administrators at Hazardville Memorial School in Enfield called the police on a five-year-old in kindergarten. The call to 911 was placed at 9:57 am. By that time, teachers and special education instructors had been handling a situation with five-year-old Cody (fake name) for about an hour. That morning, Cody had kicked a classmate, at which point teachers evacuated the classroom, called in the school’s crisis intervention team, and secluded Cody in the classroom with adults restraining him from kicking or hitting.
This particular incident with Cody was one of thirty-nine restraints or seclusions of the boy between October 2, 2023, and May 20, 2024. At five years old, Cody is small, hardly a real physical danger, and easily restrained by the teachers. He was later diagnosed with autism, which causes his emotional dysregulation and can lead to outbursts. Dave alleges that during an earlier incident, he found that staff had been isolating Cody in a “windowless, solid-core doored, single stall bathroom that’s inside a little storage space between classrooms.”
LA: Judge ends federal oversight of special education in New Orleans schools
Louisiana Illuminator
More than a decade of federal oversight of special education in New Orleans charter schools has ended, following a March 31 decision by U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey to terminate a sweeping consent judgment, which went into effect in early 2015. That consent judgment resulted from a class-action lawsuit filed by parents of charter school students against the Louisiana Department of Education. In the years after Hurricane Katrina, the state took over the majority of the city’s schools, converting them from traditional, district-run schools to quasi-autonomous charters, whose day-to-day operations are managed by private, nonprofit groups. The Orleans Parish School Board, which has since taken over the regulation of nearly all of the city’s schools, was later added as a co-defendant.
After years of good marks from a court-appointed independent monitor, the Orleans Parish School Board and the Department of Education formally requested release from federal monitoring. But parents of students with disabilities and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represents the plaintiffs, had asked the court to continue the consent judgment, saying the city’s schools were not ready to come out from under federal oversight.
During an informal hearing before Zainey in November, called to hear parents’ concerns about the potential termination of the consent decree, dozens of people alleged that their children had been subjected to violations of federal special education law, despite federal monitoring. Plaintiffs said that the school district and state still lacked robust internal monitoring and oversight of New Orleans charters for the consent decree to end. But Zainey disagreed. Though problems with special education persist at some schools, the consent decree was primarily intended to address systemic issues — and whether the state and district are catching problems and implementing plans to correct them — rather than individual students’ experiences. “Most if not all of the individual problems raised could not plausibly be traced to a systemic failure, and some problems, while causing palpable frustration to class members, did not necessarily constitute a violation of federal law,” Zainey wrote in his ruling terminating the consent judgment this week.