Wisconsin's special ed fund only covers a third of what schools spend. See what it means for your district.
Rory Linnane
For over a decade, Wisconsin's funding stream for special education services has covered less than a third of the costs, leaving school districts to pull from their general aid to cover the rest.
Now residents can see how much their own school districts are have spent on special education — and how far short the state funding falls — with a new tool and report from the Education Law Center, a New Jersey-based nonprofit that advocates for equitable school funding.
The report comes weeks before Gov. Tony Evers, who has called for more special education funding, faces an election challenge from Tim Michels, who has criticized Evers' plans to spend more on public education.
Mary McKillip, a senior researcher at the Education Law Center who co-authored the report, said her team decided to look at the issue because public schools advocates in Wisconsin have made it a priority and asked the center to look into the specifics. The research was funded by a W.K. Kellogg Foundation grant.
A broad coalition of business executives and private school leaders, too, have called on lawmakers to support more funding for special education.
The Education Law Center report, building on a 2019 report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum about the statewide funding shortfall, drilled into each school district individually with 2019-20 data.
It found that the shortfall was worse for districts with higher rates of poverty, where there are more students with disabilities and schools must spend more on special education services.
But all districts are affected. Most districts had to pull between $1,000 and $2,000 in regular education funding per student to cover special education services that were not reimbursed by state and federal special education funding streams, the report found.
The researchers concluded that increasing special education funding would benefit all students by preventing that diversion of regular education funds.
"Just increasing that rate will help all of the students in the district by freeing up some of that funding that could then go to the entire student population and support them all," McKillip said.
Why does special education funding fall short?
Wisconsin's fund for special education is set each year with a finite pot of money, regardless of how much school districts actually spend on special education services.
Public schools, unlike private schools, are required under federal law to meet the needs of students with disabilities as outlined in individualized education plans, regardless of cost.
As costs have increased, the state pot of funding has not kept up. The 2019 report from the WisPolicy Forum made this clear.
In 1973, the pot of money covered 70% of the state's special education costs. By 2007, it was covering only about 29%. It continued declining, to about 25% in 2018, the forum reported.
In 2019, a bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission on school funding recommended increasing special education funding to at least 30% or up to 60%.
In the past few years, lawmakers have increased coverage to about 30% of the costs in the 2021-22 school year, said forum researcher Sara Shaw.
Julie Underwood, former chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, served on the Blue Ribbon Commission and is currently pushing for 90% coverage, in her role as president of the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools.
"It is a federal mandate to educate all children with disabilities; we have to provide them a free appropriate public education, as we should," Underwood said. "But when the state stepped back from funding that more and more, it became more and more expensive for local school districts to make good on that promise."
Federal funding has also been stagnant, covering about 12% of special education costs in Wisconsin in 2016, the forum reported, though the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act authorized the government to cover up to 40%.
That leaves districts on the hook to cover the rest.
In total, Wisconsin schools had to pull about $1.25 billion from their regular education budgets to cover special education services in the 2019-20 school year, the new Education Law Center report found.
Some district leaders say that cuts into services for all students, leading to fewer resources and higher class sizes.
Why are costs higher for high-poverty districts?
The shortfall was highest in districts with higher rates of poverty, the Education Law Center reported, as those districts have higher numbers of students with disabilities who need special education services.
The center compared Milwaukee Public Schools with the Whitefish Bay School District.
In the 2019-20 school year, 84% of MPS students qualified as low income and 20% were identified as having disabilities. In Whitefish Bay, 2% of students were low income and 11% had disabilities.
MPS had to use about $2,000 of its general funding per student to cover special education costs while Whitefish Bay had to pull about $1,100 per student.
If special education were more fully funded, MPS School Board President Bob Peterson said, the district could hire more staff to improve special education services and lower their caseloads, and also retain more funding for staff for all students.
Researchers have found a variety of reasons why students from lower-income families, and students of color, are more likely to need special education services.
As a result of racist housing policies and governmental neglect, many children have been exposed to lead in their water or paint, live in food deserts, and deal with other environmental stressors that affect their development.
Many families also struggle to access early childhood education and other learning opportunities that wealthier families can attain.
When lower-income districts have to spend more on special education costs, the problem is compounded, said John Gaier, superintendent of the Neillsville School District, a rural district in Central Wisconsin where about half of students are considered economically disadvantaged.
"We get $10,000 per student. We put $900,000 last year into backfilling what wasn’t covered in special education funding," Gaier said. "And that means the first 90 kids that come in my district, that money can’t be spent on any of their regular education needs."
If there was more state funding for special education and the district could keep more funds for regular education, Gaier said, it might reduce the number of students who need special education. More teachers and interventionists could help all students get what they need in the classroom.
"So if you could invest more into those programs, especially at the early ages, it very well could reduce the percentage of kids that require special education," said Gaier.
Gaier serves as the chair of the Wisconsin Association for Equity in Funding, a coalition of urban and rural school district leaders that has worked to raise awareness about funding inequities.
"It's really important that we understand that it takes more services to get special needs kids and economically disadvantaged kids to the proficiency levels that everybody is demanding. So we need to understand that if it takes more, we need to invest in them," Gaier said.
While districts with lower rates of poverty spent less on services overall because of the lower numbers of students with disabilities, they were able to spend more on services for the students who did have disabilities, the Education Law Center report found.
Less funding for special education can degrade the quality of the services, said Rachel Fish, an assistant professor of special education at New York University who has studied students with disabilities in Wisconsin.
"Doing this right does require resources," Fish said. "We need better inclusive services. We need students with disabilities to be able to attend classrooms with their peers with and without disabilities, and all of that means we need more teachers."
In schools with higher rates of poverty and fewer resources, Fish said, many teachers told her they were wary about flagging a student as potentially needing special education services because they worried it could do more harm than good.
"A lot of the teachers would tell me, I don't know if it really helps to refer them," Fish said, "not because of anybody doing a bad job but because the teachers were so stretched thin and didn't have the resources to serve those kids well."
Learn more about your district
To see the amount of spending on special education in each Wisconsin school district, along with the funding sources, visit the Education Law Center's online tool at bit.ly/SpecialEdUnfundedCosts .
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Contact Rory Linnane at rory.linnane@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @RoryLinnane.