Bush Set to Sign Revised Special Education Law
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 – The 108th Congress is poised to send a bill to President Bush that would reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, updating the law that provides money and protections for the country’s 6.7 million disabled students.
The House voted 397-3 in favor of the legislation Friday and the Senate approved it by voice vote before adjourning.
President Bush will likely sign the IDEA reauthorization into law before the completion of his first term.
House and Senate negotiators announced Wednesday that after an almost two-year debate, they had reached a compromise on the specific reforms each chamber sought for the current legislation, which was last modified in 1997.
The changes range from improving the discipline system for special education students to increasing standards for special education teachers, working more directly with parents and minimizing bureaucratic inefficiency.
“The agreement we have reached demonstrates what America has come to realize, that students with disabilities are a far too important priority to be used as a political tool or cast aside because of an election schedule,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the senior Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Kennedy, who co-authored the Senate version of the bill, has been involved with special education law since 1975, when Congress passed landmark legislation intended to ensure free and appropriate education for students with disabilities.
According to a Kennedy spokesman, the senator was instrumental in pushing through the legislation during the lame-duck congressional session.
Kennedy has acknowledged that parents might prefer the disciplinary protections of the 1997 law, but added that the Senate took steps to prevent special education students from being disciplined for behavior resulting from their disability.
Cutting red tape
The last reauthorization required a hearing whenever a disabled student faced school suspension of more than 10 days. Those hearings were designed to determine whether a disability identified on the student’s individualized education program had caused the misbehavior.
Currently, all members of a student’s individualized education team must be present at those meetings, a mandate that critics say slows the disciplinary process. The new bill requires that only the relevant members attend.
“With an (individualized education program) meeting comes a tremendous amount of red tape,” said Alexa Marrero, a spokeswoman for Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “Now the school, the parent and the relevant members of the (program) are going to get together and look at the fact patterns. It’s going to make a big difference.”
According to Marrero, schools have had an extremely difficult time separating infractions from disabilities and some teachers have complained that they lack control. “Virtually everything could be attributed to a disability,” Marrero said. “The burden of proof was entirely on the schools, and they had to prove a negative.”
Gary Urgonski, director of special education at Cape Cod Regional Technical High School in Harwich, said that assembling a student’s whole team can be difficult and that as long as all the necessary people are at the hearing, special education students will remain protected.
Urgonski oversees more than 200 special education students at Cape Cod Tech. According to the Massachusetts Department of Education, there were more than 3,900 special education students in Barnstable County in the 2003-2004 school year.
40 percent goal far off
The bill would require new special education teachers to meet competency standards in their subject areas, something currently required of other classroom teachers. To calm critics who said that special education teachers often teach multiple subjects, the bill provides teachers additional time to comply as long as they meet standards in their primary field.
Bill Rokicki, director of student services for Falmouth schools, said the goal is retaining the best teachers, not imposing stiffer standards. “It’s an absolute myth that if we raise the standards, we get better teachers,” he said. “If you raise salaries, then you get the better teachers.”
Special education funding remains controversial. According to the original 1975 legislation, Congress must provide schools with 40 percent of the funding needed for special education programming – a percentage it has never achieved. The bulk of special education funding comes from local taxes.
While the federal appropriation has increased from $2.1 billion in 1994 to $10.1 billion in 2004, Congress still currently provides only 19 percent of special education funding. The new bill calls for Congress to “recommit” to reaching that 40 percent mark by 2011.
“I deeply regret that this bill does not require the federal government to meet its full funding commitment to local schools to help them cover the costs of special education,” Kennedy said on the Senate floor Friday.
Walter Healy, executive director of the Cape Cod Collaborative, which helps coordinate a variety of education-related services throughout the Cape, was hardly surprised.
“The intentions are good, but they set a goal of 40 percent, and they never come through with it,” Healy said. “And the locals have to make up the difference.”
(Published: November 22, 2004)
