Province’s announcement of new funding for special education raises key questions

The Provincial government issued a potentially promising announcement today about plans to restore targeted funding for special education. The official announcement does not provide much detail to draw conclusions from, but it does raise three key questions:

1. How much new money??

The Minister says the new funding will be in the range of "tens of millions" so perhaps $20 million (a drop in the bucket when spread across BC's 55,000 designated students with special needs) or $90 million (which could really make a serious dent in addressing challenges, if allocated effectively).

In our recent brief to the provincial budget committee, MOMS urged an immediate reinvestment of targeted special education grants totalling $110 million (basically this would simply restore the targeted grants for high incidence students that Christy Clark eliminated when she was education minister in 2002), and take us back to where we were in 2001.

• It would not cover additional needs due to rising numbers of students with special needs (special needs enrolment is up around 5% since 2000/2001)
• It would also not cover the additional costs of staff salary/benefit increases since 2001 (teacher salaries rose by ~ 27% in the past decade)

2. How will it be allocated??

Another question is how the new funds will be allocated and who gets to decide that. The notice suggests that teachers, their union and administrators would decide which are the neediest classrooms that can access this new funding to provide extra classroom supports.

The idea of a select group controlling access to these funds based on a competitive process and subjective assessments of which classroom has the most urgent needs could be very problematic. Especially so if these decisions are made by staff unions and administrators, as described, without input or review from parents, students and other stakeholders.

Under current provincial policy, parents and students with special needs are key partners in identifying priority special education needs and required resources at the individual level through the IEP (Individual Education Planning) process. Parents and other stakeholders are also key partners in advising on resource allocation priorities at the school and district levels, through public board budget processes and legislated school planning councils.

Under the current provincial funding formula, students with low-incidence special needs designations (like autism) generate supplemental grants, added to the funding that local boards receive from the Ministry. How those grants are spent and how much more/ less actually goes to special education is for boards to decide.

The challenge with school and board resource allocation processes is that special education is one of many competing stakeholder priorities, so there's no guarantee that new or existing funds will go to special education. In most cases, boards claim they already spend far more than they receive in grants on special education services and programs. But we certainly hear frequent complaints that at the board, school and even the classroom level, there can be enormous divergence in how the obligation to meet special education needs is interpreted.

Nevertheless, well-established existing processes for setting priorities and allocating resources would seem to be the logical starting point for deciding who gets what. Restoring the special education grants for high-incidence students with special needs (e.g. LD) would be a good start and would help to focus attention on a population of students that has suffered the most under the erosion that we've seen in the past decade.

3. Where is the accountability?

We have emphasized that the erosion of special education resources has not just been an issue of funding, but also one of accountability. The lack of accountability at any level for outcomes among students with special needs has certainly facilitated the erosion of special education resources. But questions are also frequently raised about whether the remaining resources are effectively spent. Without any evaluation or performance measures, no one can answer whether resources are being used as wisely as possible to support positive outcomes or benefits for students with special needs.

If we're investing new dollars in special education, we want to ensure those dollars are focussed where they can make the most difference for students and that they are spent in the most effectively manner to maximize benefits. For example, most BC-certified teachers, including most of those hired in specialist special education positions in recent years, have no training in special education or inclusion strategies. So simply hiring more unspecialized teachers may not be the best way to spend new dollars. You might achieve far more benefits for students (and more job satisfaction for teachers) by investing instead in training the existing teachers to use specialized teaching and inclusion strategies to make their classes more manageable and help all their students succeed.

BC already has a series of small, grossly-underfunded "provincial resource programs" that could serve as vehicles for distributing that kind of funding to support individual students and classrooms, while building capacity among teachers. Using the existing PRP channels also provides a basic answer to the question of who decides where the (limited) money goes and what are the most urgent needs, because those mechanisms are already in place.

In our recent brief, MOMS urged the province to establish a multi-stakeholder special education advisory table to advise the ministry at the macro level on how best to structure and focus a reinvestment in special education to ensure that it's focussed on maximizing positive outcomes for students who need support to succeed in school. Such a body could also advise on distribution mechanisms and workable accountability measures to ensure that new and existing dollars are spent as effectively as possible. It might advise, for example, that portions of the new funding be spent in different ways - i.e. a mix of highly-focussed projects to address key barriers as well as broad distribution to the front lines.

A final thought is that if new funds for special education are targeted and spent effectively with the overall goal of providing direct support, removing barriers AND building staff capacity, that would leverage and maximize the benefits of the investment. So it's not just a one-time benefit for the formally-designated students with special needs who generates additional supports, but ongoing benefits for students in subsequent years and also for the many "typical" students who occasionally struggle academically but whose outcomes could really be turned around just from the spin-off benefits of classrooms that are better equipped for learning as well as learning challenges.

4. Write the Minister

Please consider dropping a note to Education Minister George Abbott: [email protected] ; Premier Christy Clark: [email protected] and your MLA ( http://www.leg.bc.ca/mla/3-1-1.htm ) to thank them for finally acknowledging the devastating impacts of cuts to special education and to urge them to address the above questions to ensure that our students get the support they need to succeed.

5. Further reading:

The following VPSI briefs provide further reading on class composition issues and special education funding in K-12:

• Resolving class composition - what will/won't work
• 2009 provincial brief on special ed funding
• 2010 letter to the minister re special ed cuts
• 2011: VSB stats on eroding special ed staffing/growing enrolment for students with special needs
• 2011: Provincial enrolment trends - students with special needs

The Tyee also had a good recent report on the special education funding shortfall:

More BC/Vancouver special education info at Vancouver Parents for Successful Inclusion