Special Education Co-ops Protest Funding Cuts (KS)
July 9, 2010
Kansas special education programs could lose nearly $9 million for the most severely disabled children who require full-time one-on-one assistance from a nurse or highly trained paraprofessional.
South Central Kansas Special Education Cooperative, which serves 15 school districts centering around Pratt, will lose $250,000, about 43 percent of its total Medicaid revenue, that paid for attendant care services.
Special education administrators learned of the impending cuts in a conference call late in June. They’re not accepting the news quietly.
“We certainly have the attention of executives of Medicaid because we have been screaming so loudly,” Lynn Ahrens, director of SCKSEC, said.
A meeting is being arranged with special education administrators and Medicaid policy-makers at the federal level, she said.
If they are unsuccessful in getting some funds restored, cuts will have to be made in other areas of the budget, possibly in supplies and in-service training for staff. Four staff positions are currently vacant and some may be left unfilled, Ahrens speculated.
Not providing attendant care for children who need the help, either because of severe physical or behavioral problems, is not an option — it is mandated by the federal government, bes ides being morally and ethically wrong, she said.
The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services notified the Kansas Health Policy Authority in the last two months that it would disallow attendant care payments to schools, Deputy Director Doug Farmer said. The issue was that if CMS was going to pay for attendant care it would have to be made available for “everyone, everywhere,” Farmer said, not just through the schools.
KHPA’s best estimate to expand services to all qualifying children, whether in school or at home, was $25 million annually, of which a portion would come from the state’s general fund.
“Obviously that’s not something we can do in this financial climate.” he said.
KHPA has turned in a state plan amendment to change the way it reimburses school districts for special education. Farmer said the new plan would keep funding for school districts as a group at the same level as before, although some districts would receive more money and some less. “Not every district will remain whole,” he said, and he could not make a prediction of which districts or cooperatives might “win or lose” based on demographics.
Farmer hoped a CMS decision would be received later this month and indicated some supplemental money might be available from the Kansas Department of Education.