Feds Tell Texas It Must End Threshold Dictating Children's Access To Special Education

AUSTIN, TX -- The federal government put Texas on notice Monday that it must end its so-called "PBMAS Indicator 10" that penalizes school districts that provide special education to more than 8.5 percent of their students.

"It appears that the state's approach to monitoring local educational agency compliance under the PBMAS Indicator 10 may be resulting in districts' failure to identify and evaluate all students suspected of having a disability and who need special education," Sue Swenson, the department's acting assistant secretary for special education, wrote in a letter to the Texas Education Agency, according to media reports.

The state program's special education enrollment target is at the crux of the federal government's opposition. Federal officials told TEA the state must eliminate their special ed enrollment target unless they can provie that is has not kept children with disabilities from getting services, the Houston Chronicle reported.

To that end, U.S. Department of Education officials have given Texas officials one month to provide the requested evidence or outline a plan to end the PBMAS Indicator 10 program.

"Depending on TEA's response," Swenson wrote, the federal government "will determine whether additional monitoring activities or other administrative enforcement or corrective actions are necessary."

For their part, TEA officials have denied that children with disabilities have been prevented from receiving special education. Still, they have pledged to review the issue, the Chronicle reported.

The Chronicle has led in reporting on the issue, revealing last month the existence of the arbitrary 8.5 percent target it found the TEA had quietly implemented without consulting the Texas Legislature, State Board of Education or the federal government.

The agency, the Houston Chronicle previously reported, has required some school districts that serve more than 8.5 percent of kids to devise a "Corrective Action Plans." In response, the newspaper reported, schools have made special education much harder to access.

When the policy began in 2004, about 12 percent of Texas students received some form of special education services such as tutoring, therapies and counseling, accoding to the Chronicle. That level was close to the longtime national average of roughly 13 percent.
Since the machinations to lower the threshold, the Texas percentage has emerged, by far, as the lowest in the entire United States.

The Houston Chronicle blew the lid wide open on this lowered special education percentage maneuvering in an investigative report titled: "Denied: How Texas Keeps Tens of Thousands of Children Out Of Special Education." The paper's investigation unleashed a massive reaction, including from House Speaker Joe Straus who wrote that "Students who need special education should not be kept out of it," while vowing to conduct a thorough review of the TEA practice.

As the Chronicle reported, lowered percentages for special education access dropped among some of the state's biggest school districts contained within Straus's own area of legislative representation:

At the Northeast ISD serving northeastern San Antonio (the second-largest districts in the states second-largest city) from 15.3 percent in 2004 to 9.2 percent today -- a 40 percent decine.

In the city's largest school district, the Northside ISD in the northwestern portion, from 14.7 percent to 11.1 percent.

In the third-largest district, San Antonio ISD serving the central portion of the city, from 12.7 percent to 10.2 percent.

"Although federal law requires school districts to identify and serve all students with disabilities who require special education services, concerns have been expressed recently that some districts have delayed or denied those services to eligible students," Straus wrote in a Sept. 15 Facebook post.

Straus's words were measured when compared to those of other politicians who learned of the implications of the 8.5 percent threshold: "The concentric circles of damage that this has done I thin is immeasurable at this point," Thomas Ratliff, a Mount Pleasant Republican who's the second-highest ranking member of the State Board of Education, told the Chronicle.

State Sen. Eddie Lucio, the vice chair of the Senate Education Committee, said: “By urging schools to limit the number of students they enroll in special education services, our state is turning its back on students that need our help the most.”

Another board member and its former president, Rhonda Skillern-Jones, was more strident: “It is a grave injustice to deprive any child of the resources necessary to learn and to do so systematically is a travesty,” she said, as quoted by the Chronicle.

>>> Read the full story at the Houston Chronicle

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