As the national debt continues to soar and policymakers in both Massachusetts and in Washington argue over how to cut government spending, school districts like Walpole are being left in the lurch by continued cuts in state and federal funding. But unlike most other municipal departments covered by the town budget, the Walpole School Department is required under a wide range of federal and state regulations to provide certain services to students without any funding mechanisms to provide those services. As a result, while politicians cut education programs to show voters how conservative they can be, schools are left to pay for a number of mandates on their own, often at the expense of students as a whole. This irresponsible approach is negatively impact students as a whole. At such a critical time, the federal and state governments should spend the money to fund their wide mandates or else allow schools like Walpole to violate the mandates and eliminate the regulations that are increasingly demanding.
Among the most arduous of the unfunded mandates are the regulations overseeing the Walpole Special Education Department. Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), passed in 1990, every public school in the nation is required to provide free and equal education to students with disabilities between the ages of 3 and 22 years old. The concept sounds simple enough, and politicians have heralded the successes of IDEA. But the program has been grossly underfunded for decades. Without federal funding for the program, school districts like Walpole are forced by law to take money out of their budgets for regular education students and spend it on managing the needs of an increasingly bureaucratic special education process.
When the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the predecessor to IDEA, was first enacted in 1975, Congress allowed the federal government to spend a maximum of 40 percent of a state’s average per pupil expenditure on the program. But in the years since, the federal government has never provided more than 30 percent in funding for IDEA. The New America Foundation’s Federal Education Budget Project estimates that IDEA is currently underfunded by almost $15 billion. As a result, schools like Walpole are left to cover the costs of the shortfalls, using money that should be going toward hiring and retaining new teachers.
The Walpole High School Special Education Department serves almost 150 students, and class sizes in the SPED Department are generally small. In contrast, normal education classes for the rest of the high school student body are made up of almost 30 students. Meanwhile, the Walpole School Department spends millions of dollars every year on providing transportation to certain special education students to go to other more specialized schools in the area – all required under the law and woefully underfunded by the federal government. Walpole spends up to several hundred thousand dollars per student on ensuring some students are able to go to other schools to meet their needs, while regular students suffer the effects of the loss of that funding.
According to School Superintendent Lincoln Lynch, the Walpole school district is required by state law to spend almost $28 million per year on education for both special education and regular education, and much of the Walpole school budget is required to go towards specific uses, like Special Education. “Very few dollars in a school budget is non-discretionary,” Lynch said.
Teachers in Walpole have to fill out mountains of paperwork in order to comply with IDEA’s vast requirements, which stipulate step-by-step processes by which students are identified as special education students and then placed in special programs. The entire process, which involves meetings and forms, takes time away from actual teaching. According to the US Department of Education’s own estimates, state and local educators spend a total of almost 7 million hours per year and millions of dollars completing the mountainous paperwork required by federal regulations, mostly related to IDEA.
In 2002, the President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education released a report in which they recommended serious reforms in the paperwork process. “At all levels, the Commission finds that the emphasis on IDEA paperwork requirements is unnecessarily onerous,” their final report read. While many of the Commission’s concerns were addressed by the 2004 No Child Left Behind Act, much of the paperwork and special education requirements still exist.
A random survey of teachers at Walpole High who teach classes at all different levels, from CP-2 to AP, said that Special Education paperwork generally takes about 10 minutes per student to fill out. But attending IEP meetings and filling out forms for multiple students can add up in time consumed away from actual teaching in the classroom.
Special education teachers, too, are given reams of paperwork to comply with federal statutes. A recent report from the Center of Personnel Studies in Special Education at the University of Florida found that nearly half of all new special education teachers leave after three years because of, among other reasons, paperwork mandates. Special education teachers already have a difficult job, and the mandates are unnecessarily hurting the profession.
The teaching profession is already considered a generally underpaid profession, and schools have tremendous difficulty attracting and retaining teachers. With the starting pay generally low, most teachers will teach out of a passion for teaching, not because they want money. As a result, the paperwork and extensive regulations that must be complied with are taking the teachers away from their passion and are negatively impacting regular students who are looking for an opportunity to learn.
While the Walpole Special Education Department has done its best over the past few years of belt-tightening to cut its costs, more must be done by the federal and state governments to help relieve the strain on schools to comply with its regulations. With a debate raging over how to cut the national debt, there is little appetite for fully funding IDEA or any other special education regulations. But there are ways to cut down on the paperwork and thus return teachers to the classroom. For example, the President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education recommended in 2002 that the US Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) change its culture to emphasize results, rather than compliance. Congress has also held hearings in recent months to consider streamlining the Department of Education and saving time for teachers. “Currently, the paperwork imposed by the Department of Education is larger than that of the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Justice,” Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter told a Congressional Committee in March. Hunter has proposed numerous bills that seek to consolidate and cut down the size of the Department of Education to make it easier for school districts to comply with regulations. The New America Foundation has proposed changing the formulas by which states receive funding for IDEA, and monitoring costs to achieve maximum efficiency for the maximum number of students. Thus far, Congress has failed to act on any of their proposals.
With more politicians pushing for more responsible federal spending, now is not the time to continue cutting back funding on mandates that are hurting schools. If Congress continues to implement and maintain mandates, they must follow up with spending for those programs.
