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Texas students, especially those with disabilities, could be disproportionately affected as lawmakers consider creating a school voucher system. While the law still requires the lowest-performing public schools to offer special education, private schools have no similar obligation.
Voucher bills proposed in both the Senate and House would funnel taxpayer money to families to pay private school tuition, potentially jeopardizing access for more than 700,000 students enrolled in public special education programs in Texas.
No one feels these programs are perfect — families of children with disabilities often have to fight for facilities, resources, and accommodations — but their system of checks and balances on public schools gives them a starting point.
But federal laws that give students with disabilities a right to an education don’t apply to private schools, and the few private schools that specialize in serving children with various types of disabilities face several hurdles to entry.
First, there are only 67 such schools in total, and the majority are concentrated in urban areas such as the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Harris County, and San Antonio.
To arrive at its figures, The Texas Tribune used data provided by the Texas Private School Accrediting Commission and the Texas Association of Private Schools to identify schools that offer programs for students with special needs, misbehavior or risky behavior, which were identified on each school’s website or by phone.
Many of these schools have limitations on the types of disabilities they will accept – some state on their websites that they prefer students with “average to above average intelligence” – and if a school can only accept students with dyslexia, but not those with behavioral problems or complex medical issues, it is excluding countless other students with disabilities in the surrounding area.
Finally, even with vouchers, schools with tuition fees approaching $40,000 per year would still be too expensive for most Texans, and for those who could afford it, class sizes would be limited, with many schools averaging fewer than 200 seats per school.
As the debate continues over whether to implement education savings accounts, some lawmakers have touted the schools as a potential alternative to make up for shortcomings in public special education.
Over the years, Texas and the federal government have poured billions of taxpayer dollars into public special education — more than $5 billion in 2020 — but public schools in both rural and urban areas still struggle to meet the needs of special education students.
“The Texas special education system as a whole is dysfunctional,” said David DeMatthews, an associate professor in the School of Educational Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s a long-standing and pressing problem, and it has many different dimensions, but overall, the state is not doing a good job.”
Part of the problem, advocates say, is that cultural attitudes toward people with disabilities overall have been slow to change.
The Senate voucher bill approved earlier this month would give families $8,000 a year for private school tuition and allow private schools to reserve “up to 20 percent” of their seats for students with disabilities, a figure advocates see as a ceiling. The House bill is a compromise that includes an increase in public education funding and would give parents 75 percent of the average amount schools receive per student. Gov. Greg Abbott has called the plan “inadequate.”
“The idea is that the market will somehow stop private schools from discriminating against children with disabilities, whose education is very expensive,” DeMatthews said.
Texas Public Special Education
When Dominique Schindell started first grade, her doctor recommended the school buy a computer. Writing with her hands was a struggle. Schindell was born with arthrogryposis, which limits her movement and makes her use a wheelchair.
His mother, Celeste Picasso, said the school lightened her son’s load in exchange for giving him a laptop, which she said helped in some ways but caused him to fall behind his classmates in others.
She said it was just one example of how public schools in Sanderson, a town of about 850 people about four hours west of San Antonio, lacked the resources to help her son. Bullying and discriminatory treatment from teachers have meant that Shindell has struggled to get the same level of education as his peers.
“The hydraulic lift system on my son’s school bus has been broken for years,” Picasso said. “The bus couldn’t pick him up, which meant he was late to school or even missed school.”
Steven Aleman, senior policy specialist at Disability Rights Texas, said decades of underfunding and mismanagement have meant public school districts have struggled to identify and provide resources for a steadily growing student population that has grown by 200,000 students in the past five years.
Since 1975, the Education for Students with Disabilities Act has required public schools to accommodate students with disabilities and provide them with an “individualized education plan” that best meets their needs — a law that advocates call a “minimum.”
But Texas has always struggled to comply with all of the requirements.
Between 2004 and 2017, countless students went without the help they needed because the state limited the number of special needs students that school districts could identify to 8.5% of their students — well below the current national average of about 15%.
Since then, federal officials have imposed reform initiatives on the state, and now, about 11.6% of students in the state receive special education in schools, according to the TEA’s 2022 report.
But things haven’t necessarily improved: Federal regulators’ most recent assessment of special education in Texas left students with the same rating as for at least the past three years: “needing help,” which is “the equivalent of getting a D or an F in a class,” DeMatthews said.
Earlier this month, the Texas Education Agency appointed a monitor to oversee the Austin Independent School District’s special education department.
Aleman said the current funding system, in which the State School Fund pays schools on an individual basis, doesn’t take into account the intensity of care some students may need and contributes to the woes of many school districts.
According to the Texas Education Code, schools are required to spend at least 55% of their special education funds on the special education programs themselves. In rare cases, school districts can use special education funds to send a student to a nearby private school or transfer to another school district.
“Frankly, there are financial barriers to school districts doing everything that is being asked of them,” Aleman said. “This formula has been around for over 30 years and is now very outdated. We believe that this formula does not efficiently provide resources for school districts to provide the services they need for students with disabilities.”
State lawmakers went so far as to create a task force to find a special education funding solution, and their recommendations for 2022 included increased funding for student transportation, hiring qualified teachers and teacher certification.
But only one of their recommendations has made it outside the House floor — the final, most controversial and one supported by Gov. Greg Abbott in particular — education savings accounts, known to many as vouchers.
Picasso said the voucher system is unappealing: As a low-income parent who lives hundreds of miles from the nearest private school and has a strong support system based in Sanderson, she said she wouldn’t see any improvement from it.
“There are basic facilities that I’ve been fighting for for years for my son, basic things like a lift system because he can’t bend his legs and he can’t get up off the floor,” Picasso said. “But it’s a time-consuming process, and while there are things that can be changed within the special education system, I still don’t see where a voucher would be beneficial.”
How vouchers may or may not help
For families living in cities like Austin, vouchers could make a big difference — if they can afford it.
“This is not a catastrophe,” said David Beinke, a special education advocate who helps families across the state, including Picasso. “There are schools in major metropolitan areas like Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, Houston, Harris County, Travis County and even El Paso that have the capacity and expertise to help.”
But the lack of transparency from private schools has parents and advocates worried, he said.
“nevertheless [public] The school is really bad, but we still have a chance. We can file a complaint with the TEA and [Office of Civil Rights]”You can have a due process hearing, you can go to mediation, you can get help from a local service center. It’s incredible, but we have all of this,” Beinke said, “but when you go to a private provider or a private school, you lose that oversight.”
Linda Litzinger, a public policy specialist with Texas Parent to Parent, said her organization serves about 14,000 families and has heard numerous stories of challenges faced by students with disabilities currently attending private schools.
“At first it sounds very positive,” she says, “but after about two months, you start to realize that your kids aren’t behaving as expected. [individualized education plan] “I will support you.”
Some private schools that serve students with disabilities still highlight the use of individualized education plans (IEPs) on their websites, but Litzinger said these specialized schools may not serve students with disabilities who are mainstreamed in public schools and require fewer accommodations.
Lynn Pollard, a Dallas mother of a child with dyslexia, said she worries that some religious schools are not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, something she said she noticed while attending church.
“What I’ve learned is that without laws — and this is fundamental — without laws and regulations, there’s no accountability,” Pollard said. “Without accountability, it’s really hard to advocate for disability access.”
Beinke said that while the voucher system can be the only solution for special education for some families, it doesn’t work for all and many issues remain unresolved.
“For a child with a disability, it doesn’t matter who the governor is,” Beinke said. “All he cares about is being able to be with his peers and learn.”
Yuriko Schumacher contributed to this story.
Neelam Vohra is a Disability Reporting Fellow, covering accessibility issues affecting Texans. She was a member of the 2022-23 New York Times Fellowship class. Her fellowship is a partnership between The New York Times, The Texas Tribune and the National Center on Disability and Journalism at Arizona State University. The fellowship is funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
Disclosure: The New York Times and the University of Texas at Austin are financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is supported in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters have no role in Tribune journalism. A complete list of financial supporters can be found here.