By ANDRU VOLINSKY
From ‘A Book, an Idea and a Goat,’ Andru Volinsky’s weekly newsletter on Substack is primarily devoted to writing about the national movement for fair school funding and other means of effecting social change. Here’s the link: https://substack.com/@andruvolinsky?utm_source=profile-pageEducators, parents, students, taxpayers, people who care about promoting an inclusive democracy beware, Frank Edelblut is at it again pitching vouchers for special education while shifting more state costs to local taxpayers. (If you don’t fit one of these categories, you may want to look for another Substack writer.). A post by Peter Greene, who writes a Substack column called “Curmudgucation,” first brought the issue to my attention.
Curmudgucation
Is educating students with special needs getting expensive for your district? If you’re in New Hampshire, Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut has a message for you– “Too bad, Sucks to be you…
He was, in turn, reacting to a NHPR piece by Ann Marie Timmins.
Edelblut proposes reducing the state’s very modest Special Education Aid program by almost a third. Of course, spending on special education and related services won’t decrease by a third. They’re mandated by state laws that incorporate the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Someone has to pay for these costs and the only place to go will be to demand higher education taxes from local taxpayers in towns with very different abilities to pay. Raising $100,000 to make up for state funding cuts in Moultonborough where there is $14 million in property value to tax for each child will be a lot easier than finding this money in Pittsfield where there is less than $1 million in property value to tax. The state average is about $1.9 million. It’s just the math of our very broken school funding system.
But let’s put what Edelblut proposes to cut in perspective. NH spends about $915 million on special education and related services. Approximately, $50 million of this funding comes from the federal government through the US Department of Education. Another $100 million is funded by the state through two funding streams discussed below. Add in $14 million in Medicaid funding which is predominantly federal aid. This means the bulk of special ed funding, about $750 million, is already funded by local property taxes. Edelblut proposes adding $12 to $13 million to this burden.
NH has two funding streams related to special education. The first is called differentiated aid. It is a part of adequacy funding. For every child who qualifies for special education, the state adds $2100 to the $4100 it pays in base adequacy. Both base aid and differentiated aid are arbitrarily low numbers and are being challenged in our Rand School Funding Suit. The differentiated aid increments for special ed add up to about $61 million. The funding stream that Edelblut proposes to cut amounts to about $39 million, which he would cut to about $26 or $27 million. This funding stream, which used to be aptly named “Catastrophic Aid,” is only for the costliest special education students. It doesn’t contribute a single dollar until a district has spent more than $70,000 on a student and then the Edelblut regime nickels and dimes school districts on their reporting of qualifying expenses.
Edelblut’s claim that the vouchers can make up for the cut to special education is just plain bunk. One of the problems with vouchers is that the private schools don’t want children who need special education services. Charter schools also stick the traditional sending school districts with the bill for special ed services. When Edelblut pushed his fraudulent voucher scheme and landed one of the largest federal grants in the country to expand charter schools, the worry was that he was trying to dismantle public education by concentrating all the high-cost kids in the public schools. This includes children who live in poverty and children who qualify for special ed services. This is likely still the case and why his voucher alternative makes zero sense.
This is not to say that everything is just fine about the way NH funds special education. The average cost for each child who qualifies for special education is $29,557. At this cost, Special Education Aid is unavailable and only adequacy aid applies. The differentiated aid related to special ed is about $2100. Kids who qualify for special ed need these services to access the regular ed curriculum. Paying $2100 out of $29,557 is hardly the state paying for adequacy for these students.
Maine and Vermont have very different school funding systems than NH in general, so comparisons are difficult. Maine uses a “successful schools” model to fund the Essential Programs and Services (EPS) felt necessary to meet the state’s education goals. In this approach, the state looks at costs for an array of programs and services in successful school districts and then models costs statewide. It then adjusts for various factors such as grade range and population density and develops a per pupil cost that the state supports with funding. The EPS for the 2023-24 school year was $7700 per elementary student and $8300 for high school student.
Maine doubles its per pupil EPS cost for children who qualify for special education services.
The responsibility to pay the EPS per student cost depends on the value of property in a particular district. The goal is for the state to pay 55 percent of the EPS. Looking at all costs, the essential programs and services plus anything else the locals want, Maine winds up paying about 40 percent of the total cost of public education. This includes pre-k. NH pays 20 percent and doesn’t add a cent to federal pre-k dollars.
It also should be noted that Maine doubles the EPS for children living in poverty and multiplies by 2.5 times for children first learning English. NH’s differentiated aid for these categories earn districts an extra $2300 per child living in poverty and $800 for a child learning English.
Vermont’s school funding system is the opposite of NH’s. While school districts in Vermont establish their own budgets, most school costs are paid by the state. About two-thirds of the state funds come from a true statewide property tax and one-third from other state revenues, mainly sales taxes. In this opposite-to-NH approach, a 2017 U of Vermont study found that children were being over identified as qualifying for special ed and special ed departments were bogged down with unnecessary state bureaucracy. The UVM findings make sense because so much funding came from the state. Again, this is the opposite of NH where state funding is severely deficient. At any rate, the legislature and VT DOE responded to the UVM study by agreeing to fund 60 percent of special ed costs above a threshold and removing the requirement that special ed funds only be spent on special ed programming, thus removing the incentive to over identify and reducing the need to justify spending.
At the Rand School Funding Trial, our witnesses identified that about 70 percent of spending for special ed in NH relates to the direct costs of programs and services provided to children. We suggested this should be what the state funds, not an arbitrary $2100 per qualifying student. We also suggested the state become a payor of services that can be billed directly to cut out the unnecessary processing of paperwork at the local level. We’ve asked Judge Ruoff to recommend this approach to the legislature.
For those of you who have interest, my recent letter about how to respond to state level election losses was published by the Concord Monitor. You can find it here.
InDepthNH.org takes no position on politics, but welcomes diverse opinions at nancywestnews@gmail.com
