Around 200 people signed up to testify at the Select Committee on Special Education public hearing on Monday, April 21. The hearing was about one proposed bill: An Act Concerning the Provisions of Special Education in Connecticut, or HB7277.
The proposed legislation, which is 63 pages-long, addresses several special education topics in the state, including: regulating the costs of private special education tuition; reimbursing districts for costs of special education; and developing programming for students with special needs.
At the heart of the discussion was how cash-strapped districts and schools could support students with special needs.
“What we learned when we heard from teachers, parents, students, superintendents, members of boards of education, and education advocates is that we’re at a crisis point,” Sen. Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox, D-Trumbull, said at a press conference before the public hearing. “We are at a point where special education in the state of Connecticut is not sustainable and we need to have better oversight.”
Matin Semmel, the superintendent of the Trumbull School District, spoke the press conference and testified at the public hearing.
Trumbull, like many other school districts, pays for some students with special needs to go out of district in some circumstances. Often, these students are sent to private schools, which get more expensive every year, according to Semmel.
During the last school year, the private special education providers that the Trumbull district worked with raised their rates by more than 10%.
This is one of the many financial burdens that special education has on a school district. There are Excess Cost Reimbursement Grants (ECR) available to school districts to help cover these costs, but they are not comprehensive.
In the last scholastic year, Trumbull was only reimbursed for 60% of the costs of having students learn out of district, according to Semmel. He is asking for the state to either fully fund excess costs or commit to paying a baseline amount.
“Currently, you divide the pie up that is too small, and local property taxes and school budget freezes and cuts end up making up the difference. I cannot support new programs like pre-K when you are not currently willing or able to fund ECR to its fullest,” Semmel said at the hearing. “We need predictability, and we need protection from the catastrophic costs that come with certain students’ education.”
Although there are proposed grants and reimbursements in the bill that would support new programming and interventions for struggling students, as well as transportation for children who are sent out of district for their education, Semmel believes that money would be best spent on those up-front reimbursements.
“Once ECR is guaranteed, then it makes sense to provide more dollars to schools to provide tiered intervention to help reduce the need for special ed. programming all together,” Semmel said.
At the end of Semmel’s testimony, Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Norwich, asked Semmel if he paid attention to the rates that the Office of Policy and Management (OPM) set for special education programs run by private and nonprofit organizations.
“Having been somebody who has tried to put more money in for special education in, year after year, sometimes successful, sometimes not, I am cautious that we would want the Office of Policy and Management not setting a rate that is sustaining for the programs that you count on,” Osten said.
In addition to the 200 people who signed up to testify, more than 600 people sent written testimonies for this hearing.
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