The Crushing Cost of Special Education

Every year, Portland Public Schools spends more than a million dollars on taxis. The rides aren't for pampered administrators but for special-education students too vulnerable or too dangerous to ride buses.

Soaring transportation bills are among the many signs that special-ed costs are overwhelming Oregon school districts. Far more expensive are the customized instruction programs, designed to address disabilities almost too numerous and complicated to imagine.

For instance, many cab rides end at the Multnomah School on North Marine Drive, which serves some of Portland's most emotionally disturbed kids. "This is the school of last resort," says Principal Gay Bauman. "These kids have proven that they can't be anywhere else."

The former elementary school has been retrofitted to include stainless-steel-doored "time-out" cells with motion-sensitive locks, constant video monitoring and a security system that would be the envy of the county jail.

Staff members, trained in crisis intervention, are outfitted with metal whistles; one blast summons a squad of beefy reinforcements, including the security chief, a former pro football player.

Because of Multnomah's security measures and 3-to-1 student-staff ratio, educating its 49 students (47 of whom are boys) will cost the district more than $23,000 per student this year, nearly five times the per capita state funding Portland receives for regular education students.

Still, the more than $1 million spent on those 49 kids is a tiny fraction of Portland's special-ed budget, which, like others across the state, has rocketed ahead even as districts have cut spending on regular education.

Currently, the Portland district faces a $36 million budget deficit. To deal with this shortfall, the district is considering laying off hundreds of teachers and custodians, shortening what is already the nation's shortest school year, deferring textbook purchases and shutting down two elementary schools.

What the Portland school district cannot do, because of federal law, is cut even a penny from the $47 million it spent on special education last year. "Special ed has the first call on every dollar," says interim superintendent Jim Scherzinger. "Any service a kid needs short of a doctor, we have to provide. We don't have any choice."

Nobody is advocating denying special-ed recipients their rights, but spending more than $100,000 to educate a single special-ed student--as Portland does--while other students go without textbooks raises the uncomfortable question of whether school districts can be, as the law requires, all things to all people.

Many educators say special ed needs to be reined in. "'Sacred cow' is not the right term," says Portland Association of Teachers President Richard Garrett. "Special education is an untouchable cow."

Special education serves a broad spectrum of kids, from the straight-A student who can't pronounce the letter "r" to the student who can communicate only by moving his eyes.

To receive special ed, a student must undergo an evaluation by a team that includes a parent or guardian, a teacher and a battery of experts that can easily number in the double figures.

In all, there are 11 categories of disability that qualify kids for special ed, ranging from easily diagnosed problems such as vision and speech impairments to more complicated conditions such as learning disabilities, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism.

Congress laid out the framework for special ed in the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires that all disabled children between the ages of 3 and 21 receive a "free and appropriate public education" and that districts never spend less on special education than they did the previous year.

At the time, Congress pledged to provide 40 percent of the additional cost of providing such services, but federal support has never reached even half of that amount. "They gave us a mandate without the funding," says Portland School Board chairwoman Debbie Menashe.

Over the past decade in Portland, spending on general instruction for "regular" (i.e., non-special-ed) students has grown about 29 percent before adjusting for inflation. Over the same period, spending on special education has increased 78 percent.

If that relationship continued unchecked, Jim Scherzinger says, special education would ultimately consume all of the district's spending. "At some point the system will fall apart, and somebody will have to fix it," he says. "I think that we're pretty close to that in this state right now."

Under Oregon's school-funding formula, school districts receive $5,000 from the state for each regular-education student and twice that amount for special-education students.

While the extra $5,000 might cover the cost of a child with a slight hearing problem, it doesn't come close to covering the expense of educating students with more complex problems such as traumatic brain injuries or cerebral palsy. "What really happens is [that local school districts] make money on kids with minor disabilities," says Courtney Wilton, the chief financial officer of the David Douglas District in Southeast Portland. "And they get killed on the kids with severe problems."

Student with complicated disabilities are concentrated much more heavily in the metro area than in the rest of Oregon because Portland is home to major medical institutions and social-service agencies.

Disabled students come here from all over Oregon. "Portland serves more than 30 percent of the state's foster children, and 53 percent of them are in special ed," says Maxine Kilcrease, the Portland school district's director of special education.

In all, Kilcrease says, the Portland district spends about $13 million more on special education than it gets reimbursed for by the state--a figure that represents a big chunk of the district's current budget deficit.

For most people, the word "school" conjures an image of a classroom and a single teacher facing a sea of desks.

There's nothing like that at the Training and Education Center on Southeast 74th Avenue just south of Powell Boulevard. Each morning, specially built vans and buses equipped with hydraulic lifts and elaborate safety belts drop off some of Portland's most profoundly disabled students.

Inside, the intermittent full-throated screams of an otherwise motionless student fill the air, which, despite the center serving olding students, carries the faint whiff of soiled diapers. "We don't know why she does that," says the center's director, Shirley Burns. "She's only been with us for a little while."

A tour of the spotless, well-lit facility, which is operated by the Multnomah Education Service District, quickly illustrates how some students can cost $50,000 a year to educate. In some cases, that cost can exceed $100,000 a year and require placement in out-of-state facilities (see "Funding Crunch," at bottom of page).

In the Functional Living Skills wing, elaborate orthopedic support equipment designed for the feeding and therapy of immobile students, adult-sized diaper-changing tables and sensory provocation devices fill a large room. "A lot of this stuff is custom-built," Burns explains. "It's incredibly expensive."

The 30 kids--many of whom are nearing the age of 21, when special-ed benefits cease--face a heart-rending variety of challenges.

Imagine a 20-year-old with the body of an adult and the cognitive skills of a newborn who needs to be syringe-fed through a tube in his stomach every hour; or a young man whose only motion is the flicker of his eyes as a computer screen changes color.

For such students, Burns says, educational progress may mean learning to operate a light switch or sort differently shaped blocks of wood.

Locked into an adjacent wing are 11 kids with severe behavioral problems. There's a girl who chews on pet toys because otherwise she'll try to eat rocks, carpeting or her clothing; another student, 6 feet tall and about 300 pounds of solid muscle, communicates primarily by touching.

Much of the expense of educating such kids is the labor required. The center employs licensed and registered nurses, highly specialized teachers and numerous educational assistants to maintain a very low student-staff ratio. Each of the students with behavioral problems, for instance, requires full-time, one-on-one monitoring; some need as many as three full-time staffers.

Burns acknowledges that the money allocated to her students is in effect taken away from students in regular education. "I know that there's resentment out there," she says. "People might look at these kids and say they are a waste of tax dollars, but we're enhancing their lives, and they have a right to that."

Scott Marquardt, the superintendent of the tiny Gaston School District in Washington County, doesn't argue that all kids deserve an education, but he does worry that special ed has run amok.

Two years ago, Marquardt says, social-service agencies, with minimal consultation, placed five severely handicapped children into foster homes located within the Gaston district, one of the smallest in the metro area.

Although only four of the kids actually enrolled, the cost of providing services to them forced Marquardt to seek a $76,000 emergency bailout from the Northwest Regional Education Service District to keep his district afloat. "Ten percent of my kids are consuming a third of the budget," he says. "I'd like to see there be enough for everybody, but there isn't."

Marquardt argues that IDEA, the congressional mandate, gives social-service providers, parents and guardians tremendous leverage over the welfare not only of special-ed students, but of regular students as well. "There are no checks and balances in special ed," he says. "Parents can ask for anything they want, and because of the way the law is written, we have to provide it."

Many factors have contributed to the growth of special-ed funding. The most obvious is that the number and percentage of kids served continues to rise. In the 1976-77 school year, public schools served about 3.3 million children with disabilities nationwide. Today, according to the Department of Education, that total has grown to more than six million.

Over the past decade in Portland, the number of kids in special ed has increased about 15 percent, while overall enrollment dropped slightly.

In addition, advances in medical technology have increased the survival chances of children with severe medical problems, including birth defects and such diseases as leukemia.

Perhaps more significantly, IDEA brought a dramatic deinstitutionalization of disabled children. A generation ago, many of Shirley Burns' students, for instance, would probably have been warehoused at places such as the massive Fairview Hospital in Salem.

Today, public schools have been handed extensive responsibility for services that others formerly provided.

"We have seen a lot of cost-shifting," says Kilcrease, Portland's special-ed chief. "Let's say a child is a ward of the court and Child Services knows the child is a sex offender. In the old days, they would provide a human "tracker" to keep an eye on him. Now, often they don't tell us the kid is a predator--and certainly don't provide a tracker."

Some people question whether the growth in the number of kids placed in special ed is appropriate.

Although many kids suffer from unmistakable physical disabilities, the category "learning disabled," which includes about half of all special-ed kids in Oregon, is far more subjective.

James Ysseldyke, an educational researcher at the University of Minnesota, has said the working definition of "learning disabled," which essentially means a gap between intelligence and achievement, is so broad that it could include up to 80 percent of all students currently enrolled in public schools.

Rob Kremer, a charter-school advocate who is running for state superintendent of public instruction, shares Ysseldyke's skepticism.

Kremer cites a 1999 California Department of Education study suggesting that about 40 percent of California's special-ed students may have been in the system only because they could not read properly. "I'm convinced that a lot of these kids have nothing more wrong with them than they haven't been taught to read," Kremer says.

Critics are also concerned about who gets served by special ed and how. At one end of the spectrum, they argue, rich parents leverage the law to get their children extra services.

At Laurelhurst Elementary, one of the more affluent schools on Portland's east side, fifth-grade teacher Ron Norman, a 27-year district veteran, says some parents exploit special-ed services. "Parents assume no responsibility and demand every service possible--sometimes at the expense of children themselves," Norman says.

He points to one case in which a family's demands that their daughter be included in Laurelhurst's annual Maypole ceremony so complicated the event that it will probably be scrapped.

Other critics also say special education may perpetuate racial inequalities. Nationally, for instance, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University found in research published last year that African Americans are three times as likely to be labeled mentally retarded as whites.

Researchers have proposed a number of possible explanations for this overrepresentation, including cultural differences, racism and the desire to rid mainstream classrooms of underperforming or difficult students.

Whatever the cause, in Portland, statistics show that African-American students are overrepresented in special ed and placed in non-mainstream classrooms nearly twice as often as their percentage of district population would predict: African Americans make up 16.6 percent of Portland students but are about 32 percent of the students placed in so-called "structured learning centers."

Last fall, troubled by the overrepresentation of African Americans in special ed, a group of Portland school psychologists began researching better methods of evaluation. "We believe that our current tools may underestimate the potential of some African-American students," wrote psychologist Jane Ewert in a summary of the group's aims.

Although special education began with noble social goals, it increasing pits educators against each other and parents against school districts as all sides fight for scarce resources.

One solution, of course, is for Congress to fund its mandate. While the Bush administration has made positive statements about doing just that, local officials worry any increase might only encourage Salem to reduce state aid commensurately.

Certainly, the backlash against special-ed spending has begun. Administrators everywhere are under increasing pressure to contain costs. In Portland, Kilcrease saw her budget nearly frozen last year, which she says amounts to a de facto cut.

Kilcrease has brought scores of students back from outside service providers and is mainstreaming as many as possible. "We're trying to be smarter about the way we use our money," she says.

Marquardt, the Gaston superintendent, advocates placing a cap on the amount of money that can be spent on a child.

Like the Oregon Health Plan, his proposal is based on the idea that it is more equitable to ration resources than to pretend they are unlimited.

Whatever happens, school districts and IDEA are headed for a day of reckoning. "It may sound callous, but some of these kids are so severely disabled you wonder what the point is," says Courtney Wilton, the David Douglas CFO. "What is our role? Are we a social-services agency or a school?"


buzz@wweek.com or call 243-2122, ext. 380. We accept insider trading!

WWeek 2015

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office. Support WW's journalism today.