Schools Asked to Pay More of Special Education Costs

March 4, 2010

TOPEKA, Kan. – Harmony broke out in a House Education Committee meeting Wednesday morning. 

Both the proponents and opponents of House Bill 2409, a special education funding proposal, agreed that the current $25,000 threshold that schools must meet before receiving what is known as catastrophic aid is too low. Catastrophic aid is money schools receive to help pay the often very high additional costs of providing educations for students with profound learning disabilities or similar conditions. HB 2409 proposes to raise the threshold to $36,000.

The system works somewhat like an insurance deductibl e. Kansas schools currently pay the first $25,000 of costs for a special-needs student, and then the state covers 75 percent of the rest.  Other bills in the House and Senate have proposed a few different threshold amounts, but all include much higher costs that the school districts would have to incur.  All allow for increasing the threshold for inflation as needed.

The $36,000 number from HB 2409 was simply the original 1994 threshold of $25,000, adjusted for inflation.  But administrators from special educations cooperatives from across the state testified that the $36,000 proposed threshold in the bill was a typical cost for an average student, not ones with high financially catastrophic needs.  A middle income family with a child born in 2008 typically can expect to spend $35,850 on educational expenses before that child’s seventeenth birthday, reports the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion .

Mike Bilderback, director of the Special Services Cooperative for Wamego and an opponent of the bill, said the Kansas threshold should be increased substantially.
“Catastrophic means ‘extreme costs per child.’ Almost every co-op has kids whose needs cost $35,000.  We should be talking about kids that cost $100,000,” Bilderback said. 

The bill also would limit school districts’ current ability to count educational expenses for those highest-needs students twice.  Under current law, districts are allowed to apply transportation and other major expenses for special needs students toward the $25,000 threshold, even when other government sources are picking up parts of the cost. This so-called double dipping contributed to a big jump in the catastrophic aid claims outlined last fall in a legislative audit.

&#x 0A; Bruce Givens, special services director of the Derby public schools, said it’s not fair that some districts double dip while others don’t.

“School districts should not be double funded for a service,” Givens said. 
“We are bound constitutionally to provide education for every Kansas child and my hope is to get this revenue situation figured out” said state Rep. Eber Phelps, a Hays Democrat and Education Committee member.

“I don’t think the schools can withstand any more cuts,” Phelps said, “We’ve got to get the education situation framed up and that’s including catastrophic aid.”