More than a third of New York City preschoolers with disabilities didn’t get all the special help they were entitled to last school year, according to a report released Tuesday morning.
The report, prepared by the advocacy group New York Advocates for Children, analyzed the most recent city data for the 2021-22 school year and showed that the numbers are up from 2020-21, when 30% of children, or about 7,800 people, didn’t get all the services they needed.
This data means, for example, that a child may be getting some of the speech therapy he or she needs but not the physical therapy he or she needs — a service spelled out in his or her Individualized Education Program, or IEP.
Among the 9,800 children (about 37%) who did not receive all the services they needed were:
About 6,500 children need speech therapy, about one-quarter of those who need monolingual speech therapy and about one-third of those who need bilingual services. About 5,300 children, or 28 percent, need occupational therapy. About 2,000 children, or 26 percent, need physical therapy.
The report highlights long-standing problems in the city’s public preschool system, which serves 3- and 4-year-olds. The system has struggled to provide necessary services to all children, as required by law. Young children’s access to those services may be even more important now, because some of these students, like tens of thousands of children across the country, may have missed out on needed services as infants and toddlers early in the pandemic.
The largest difference in children who received services was by language: 69% of children who only required English instruction received services compared with 53.5% of children who required instruction in other languages.
Racial and socioeconomic disparities were smaller: 69% of white students were adequately served, compared with 67% of Hispanic children, 65.5% of black children, and 62% of Asian children. 67% of permanently housed students received services, compared with 61% of homeless children.
The city’s data may actually be “significantly” underreporting the problem, the report said. The Education Department considers a child to be “well served” if they receive all required services at least once, the report said.
“Children whose occupational therapists quit in November and have no replacements, or preschoolers who will have to wait six months to start mandated speech therapy because the Department of Education could not find a provider, are underserved from the perspective of parents and teachers but are not included in these numbers,” the report said.
In December, Mayor Eric Adams vowed to create hundreds of additional seats for preschoolers with disabilities, to ensure every child has a seat to which they’re entitled. Advocates have praised the pledge, but it’s already being tested: The city added 700 new seats this school year for students with more challenging disabilities, but about 300 preschoolers are still waiting, the report said.
Seats are a perennial problem: Last year, the report found, just over 1,000 preschoolers who needed small special education classes did not have a place in them by the end of the school year.
“We share the concerns of parents and advocates that students with disabilities have been excluded from programs and services for too long,” city Education Department spokeswoman Nicole Brownstein said in a statement. “The current administration is committed to righting this wrong.”
But the city’s promise to increase capacity does nothing to address the ongoing shortage of staff to provide the additional services these children need, which is one of the big reasons children don’t get them, said Betty Baez Mello, early childhood project director for Advocates for Children. Because the city contracts with outside organizations to provide many of these services, Advocates for Children is calling on Adams to spend an additional $50 million to increase pay for service providers and hire its own staff.
Brownstein noted that the Department of Education has expanded its own team that provides services to preschool-age children, hiring an additional 24 speech therapists, 23 traveling occupational therapists and 12 physical therapists.
Advocates for Children’s request for $50 million would also address another weakness cited in the report: speeding up evaluations of children. The group found that about 16 percent of children eligible for preschool special education services, or 1,974 children, waited more than 60 days (the legal limit) for a meeting to determine what additional services they should receive, the same rate as last year.
Over the past three years, the Department of Education has opened 21 Preschool Community Assessment (PRAC) teams. These teams provide assessments in addition to the state accreditation agencies the city contracts with. This school year, PRAC team staff had the option to work overtime so more students could be assessed. Officials said they plan to do the same next school year.
Still, Education Department officials say there aren’t enough agencies to meet the assessment needs of preschoolers as more kids are referred for services since the pandemic. They plan to work with city, state and federal officials to secure enough funding to connect kids with the services they need.
While data for the current year isn’t yet available, the organization reported receiving many calls from families struggling to access services for their young children, including one from Therese, a mother in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood who asked to be identified only by her first name for privacy reasons.
Her 4-year-old son needed the help of a special education itinerant teacher (SEIT) — a teacher who supports children with disabilities like his in mainstream kindergarten classes — but in February that teacher left her son’s kindergarten, leaving no replacement.
Therese said she emailed the district’s special education contact for a month about finding a replacement teacher without a response and took days off work to address the issue. Meanwhile, her son started talking less at home.
“Teachers started reporting to me that they weren’t communicating in the classroom,” Therese said.
Therese’s problem is not unusual: The report found that about 1,300 preschoolers, or nearly 1 in 5, didn’t receive SEIT last school year despite having it required by their IEP.
Therese eventually contacted the child advocacy group Advocates for Children, which advised her to file a complaint through 311. Her district’s special education officer then responded, blaming staff shortages for the teacher absence. By mid-May, she said, her son had received a SEIT again.
“I felt alone,” Therese said. “The Ministry of Education left me to fend for my child with special needs on my own.”
Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Reema can be reached at [email protected].