Special needs funding for private schools to be reviewed

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PROVIDENCE – A meeting will be held this afternoon between the Rhode Island Board of Regents and the Rhode Island Department of Education that could decide the fate of funding for special education in private schools across the state.

At the meeting, which will be held at the Department of Education's offices on Westminster Street in Providence, a committee created by the Board of Regents will present to the full board and the Department of Education their recommendations for funding the education of children with disabilities.

According to a memorandum from Rhode Island Department of Education commissioner Peter McWalters dated September 19, the committee's recommendation for children with disabilities who have been parentally-placed in private schools is for the state to adopt the federal regulations that were handed down in 2005 and completely abandon the state regulations that now stand.

The two sets of regulations, which currently coexist in Rhode Island, differ on the point of which municipality or municipalities should pick up the cost of providing funding for special education students in private schools. Rhode Island's regulations require the city or town where the student resides to contribute to the costs of providing for the child's special needs. According to these regulations, if a child attends a private school in a different city or town, the municipality where he or she lives is still responsible for contributing to the cost of their special education needs.

In 2005 the federal government handed down a new set of regulations that require the municipality where the school is located to contribute a certain amount of money to the education of special needs children, even if the schools are private and even if the particular children who require assistance reside in a different city or town.

Because the state's regulations were not repealed, even though federal regulations went into effect, both sets of requirements have coexisted in Rhode Island since 2005.

This means that for students with disabilities who live in one city and attend a private school in another, the municipality where the private school is located must first contribute a certain amount of money to pay for the necessary services and then the municipality where the student resides must also contribute money to ensure that the students needs are met.

The Board of Regents and the state Board of Education are now considering repealing Rhode Island's standards and, by doing so, placing the responsibility of funding special education for students in private schools on the city or town where the school is located.

That funding is, of course, in addition to whatever money the particular school is able to allot for the education of their own special needs students. The special needs accommodated by these funds run the gamut from special equipment such as hearing devices for hearing-impaired students and large print textbooks for visually-impaired students, to additional staff trained to provide speech and language therapy, among many more.

The amount of funding that municipalities are required to contribute, under both the state and federal regulations, is determined by a complex set of formulas. Under the current dual-regulation system, the amount the town where the school is located contributes is on average about $1,100 per special needs child in accordance with the federal regulations and the child's hometown then meets the rest of the cost, according to Lillian McIntyre, the Assistant Superintendent of Diocesan Catholic Schools.

Under the current system, in which both sets of regulations are being followed, Rhode Island's cities and towns are, in effect, going above and beyond the federally mandated requirements, she said. "There's nothing in the federal statute that says states can't do more than the minimum," McIntyre said.

If the state regulations are repealed, the funding required to educate students will likely not be received by private schools.

McIntyre said she hopes that reason will prevail during the meeting and the public hearings and decisions that will follow in the coming months. She hopes the members of the Board of Regents and the Department of Education will ask themselves "What would reasonable people sitting around a table and focusing on the child do to mediate the situation?"

The public hearings will be held on November 7, at 5 p.m. at the Community College of Rhode Island in Warwick and on November 8, at 5 p.m. in the Paff Auditorium at the University of Rhode Island.

Meeting minimum requirements, McIntyre said, is not enough and children with disabilities should not be lost in the fray because of an unwillingness on city, state and federal levels to fund their education. "Do Rhode Islanders want to be identified as ascribing to the laws of minimalism?" she asked.

Greg Mancini, a lawyer from North Kingstown and the parent of a special needs Diocesan student, echoes McIntyre. “It appears that there’s almost this race to the bottom to provide the minimum standard as required by federal law,” he said. “It’s very poor public policy,” he added.

Many opponents to public funding for special needs students in private schools, she said, think moving those students from the private sector to the public is a solution to the problem, a point with which McIntyre wholeheartedly disagrees. "That's not an instant solution," she said, "It's not an instant fix." Moving between schools is often traumatic for children, she said, and forces students to leave schools where they are comfortable and have an established safety net. The students who move to public school do not have a guarantee that their special education needs will be met either, and they often aren't, due to the public sector's own budget constraints.

This approach presents bigger issues for both public and private schools as well, McIntyre said. Public schools will be forced to absorb the cost of educating these students who are attending private schools. In data provided by the Catholic School department that demonstrates the number of students qualifying for special education are being taught at each elementary and secondary school in the Diocese, McIntyre broke down the costs that cities and towns would be forced to absorb, using their publicized average expenditure per pupil, if the students moved to public schools.

During the last school year there were 451 special education students in the Diocese, according to the Catholic School Department's data. If each of these students left private education to attend the public schools in the town where they live the total cost that cities, towns and the state would be forced to absorb is over $5 million dollars, according to the data.

The plan being proposed by the Board of Regents committee amounts to being "penny wise and dollar foolish," she said, "What we would like to see happen is reason prevail."

McIntyre notes that this issue affects all private schools, both faith-based and secular. "This is not just a Catholic school issue," she said.

The solution she hopes to see come out of this meeting and the coming public hearing is that both sets of regulations stand. That is, that both the town where the student lives and the town where the student attends school continue to contribute to his or her special education needs.

McIntyre said that she plans to mobilize the many parents of special education students in the Diocese to attend the November public hearings. She hopes that the Board of Regents will recognize "the basic rights of all children to learn in the environment that's best suited for them."

Government liaison for the Diocese, Father Bernard A. Healey, said "The Diocese is committed to providing a viable education choice for all students. We are hopeful that the Board of Regents will act responsibly in dealing with this vital issue facing all special needs students."