I testified before the NH House last week on a bill to change how we fund special education expenses and caused a bit of controversy. Go figure! The bill flips the script on how NH funds special ed costs from the state contributing ten percent of the costs to the state contributing eighty percent of the costs. The bill also provides for timely payment by the state, to the extent possible, in the same year as the cost is incurred. Rep. Heather Raymond, (D-Nashua) is the prime sponsor of the bill which is filed as HB 1835. Alicia Gregg (D-Nashua) and Hope Damon (D-Croydon) are co-sponsors.
Here’s how we currently pay for special ed in NH.
NH spends about $4 billion each year on k-12 public education. About 25 percent of this cost is for special education. Currently, ten percent of the special ed costs are reimbursed by the state through two programs. In FY24, the state distributed $66 million as part of its constitutionally required adequacy aid as provided in RSA 194-40-a, II (d). Every child who qualifies for special ed services gets this money at $2100 a pop over base adequacy which is about $4100 per student. That’s the state calculating its responsibility to be $6200 per student when the average cost for a student who receives special ed services is $52,500. That’s a shift from state payments funded by state taxes to local funding exclusively from local property taxes of $46,300 for each of NH’s more than 31,000 students who qualify for special ed services.
The state has a second funding program called Special Education Aid that contributes another $34 million for the highest cost special ed services. In FY 24, school districts served 955 students that qualified for this extra level of aid but not until local costs exceeded $70,000. The $34 million in payments for Special Education Aid was paid in the year after the costs were incurred and were prorated by the state at 68.79 percent. The prorated percentage is determined by the legislature after local school budgets are set.
Why Special Ed?
Special education is an important program that enables students to learn, including those who need supports or learn differently. It is a complex program that is mandated by federal and state law. In some ways, the special ed laws were adopted in response to our shocking history of the degrading warehousing of students and adults with disabilities in places like the Laconia State School.
In 1901, the New Hampshire Legislature passed legislation to establish a state school for feebleminded children. 60 children living in almshouses throughout the state were admitted to the school in 1903. By 1973, 1100 children and adults with disabilities resided at the institution, some living in sub-human conditions. Thousands of New Hampshire citizens were confined to a life with no meaning or hope for the future. Families were often cut off from friends, family and their community. In the first half of this century eugenics was widely accepted and practiced.
Here’s the controversy.
No one on the Education Funding Committee stood up for having the state pay the bulk of special education costs. That’s ok. No one is willing to talk about a new funding system so it’s not surprising they won’t increase state special ed funding by $700 million.
Even if that part of the bill fails, it’s important to teach legislators and the public how much special education costs and how little the state kicks-in to defray those costs. It’s $1 billion a year, folks.
Paying whatever the state is willing to pay in a timely fashion should not have been controversial, but it was. Rep. Popovici-Muller (R-Windham) claimed that his school district never has had a problem planning for unusual special ed costs that may show up in a district’s budget when a child moves to Windham after a school year begins or a budget has been adopted. He claims that Windham adequately reserves for the possibility of unexpected costs with a reserve fund in their school budget.
Rep. Bricchi (D-Penacook), who also chairs the Merrimack Valley School Board, disagreed pointing out her school district maintains a reserve and it commonly gets eaten up by unanticipated special ed costs. Other non-special ed areas of the budget suffer as a result.
Assuming the truth of the statement that Windham’s special ed reserve budget never gets exhausted, why are there such different experiences with managing special ed costs?
Windham v. Merrimack Valley Schools
The answer may lie in the different make-ups of the two districts. Windham is a school district of 2927 students on NH’s southern border with Massachusetts. It has less than four percent of its children living in poverty and 16.95 percent of its children qualify for special ed. The state average is about twenty-one percent.
The Merrimack Valley School District is an amalgam of five school districts in the Concord area with 2192 students. Almost thirty percent of its children live in poverty and more than twenty-five percent qualify for special ed.
It shouldn’t be controversial to note that children who live in poverty cost more to educate. Children who live in homes where parents did not achieve academically also put more of a burden on schools.
The median household income in Windham is $189,450, twice the state average. The Department of Employment Security does not keep its data by school district. However, in Boscawen, one of the towns in the Merrimack Valley School District, the median household income is $76,625. In Andover, it’s $88,125. The data is here. You can do a weighted median if you like but you’ll reach this bottom line: the families who live in the Merrimack Valley School District struggle financially and those in the Windham School District are very well off.
Additionally, two-thirds of the adults who live in Windham have earned a B.A. degree or higher, fifty percent more than the state average. In the Merrimack Valley School District that figure is between a quarter and a third. There is nothing wrong with not going to college, but it is also clear that having parents who didn’t achieve academically means schools must do more.
What should we make of this?
It should be unremarkable to conclude that school districts with very different demographics respond to the state’s under-funding of special education in very different ways.
What is remarkable is how little the representative from Windham understood about this dynamic. There was no empathy for Merrimack Valley. In fact, the Windham representative is co-sponsoring a bill (HB 1563) to further limit the state’s contribution to defray special ed costs.
You can read Andru Volinsky’s Substack here