Special-Ed Students Not Bankrupting Districts After All

I'll admit I've felt a little guilty when, at parent meetings about the sorry state of our city school district, talk has turned to budgets and shortfalls and what's going where. No one's ever quite come out and said, "It's those darn special-education students! They're bleeding us dry, I tell you!" -- and that's a good thing, because I would have to bop them in the nose -- but the subtext's always there, or maybe it's just the little voice in the back of my head saying, "And your son's full-time aide? How much does she cost? And all that therapy! And your daughter's instructional aides! You! You're the reason property taxes are through the roof!"

It's sort of a given, in snarky school board comments or newspaper articles about spiraling education costs, that the expense of smaller classrooms and more personnel and private out-of-district placements causes all the "normal" and "gifted" kids to go without textbooks and enrichment programs and, I don't know, shoes maybe. So I was overjoyed to see an item in the Special Education Law Blog declaring, "It ain't so!"

Seems the Hoover Institution, a public policy research center, actually crunched the numbers to see what kind of load out-of-district placements and other special education expenses were putting on school districts, and found ... not much of one. And if you take out the private placements school districts insisted on making -- not pushy parents, not fancy-pants special-education lawyers, but the districts themselves -- the impact's almost non-existent.

The report also points out that, while individual special-education expenditures may seem high, whether for out-of-district placements or things like, hmmm, one-on-one aides, the actual percentage they represent of school budgets overall is miniscule. There are enormous numbers of dollars being spent on education as a whole, and goodness knows, not nearly enough of them are going to pay those poor aides.

Blogger Charles Fox recommends bringing a copy of the institution's report along any time you meet with school officials who may turn down services with the declaration that "you're taking money away from the other students." I've had pretty good luck with getting services, and they've never been denied on the basis of funds (mostly, instead, on the basis of organizational incompetence). Still, I'm going to make that voice in the back of my head read that report again before I go to another one of those big parent meetings. No need for the nose I bop to be my own.

• Choosing the Right Special-Education Placement for Your Child
• How to Get an IEP for Your Child