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Special Education Parents Seek to be Heard in Sacramento
This month, policymakers in Sacramento are beginning to get serious about the state budget, which is due at the end of June. That’s why for the past two years, parent members of the SFUSD Community Advisory Committee for Special Education have taken a field trip to Sacramento to participate in the annual “Legislative Information Sharing Day.” This lobbying day was created a decade ago by special education administrators, as a way of educating parents on special education policy and funding issues, and to enlist us in their efforts to educate legislators on these issues as well.
Special education is governed by a Federal law—the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA). When IDEA was passed in 1975, the Federal government pledged to cover 40 percent of the cost of special education programs, but this pledge has never been fulfilled. In 2004, Congress set out a schedule that would bring full funding by 2011, but this schedule has been ignored in every budget passed since then. Currently, the Federal government is funding 17 percent of the cost of providing special education in California – about $1.1 billion. If the Federal government paid its full share, California special education programs would receive an additional $1.4 billion.
If that weren’t bad enough, the State government has also played politics with special education, most recently with a law that minimizes the impact of any Federal increases in IDEA funding. This highly technical provision--known rather nauseatingly as the “bifurcated COLA”--quietly passed in the last days of the 2004-05 fiscal year, and has caused school districts in California to miss out on $54 million in additional funding.
More
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4521#more
If that weren’t bad enough, the State government has also played politics with special education, most recently with a law that minimizes the impact of any Federal increases in IDEA funding. This highly technical provision--known rather nauseatingly as the “bifurcated COLA”--quietly passed in the last days of the 2004-05 fiscal year, and has caused school districts in California to miss out on $54 million in additional funding.
More
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=4521#more
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