For years, Oregon special education advocates have tried but failed to persuade lawmakers to grant school districts more money for the costs of educating the roughly 80,000 students who need individualized help during the school day because of a physical, emotional or learning disability.

The efforts have gone nowhere even as the number of students qualifying for special education services rose sharply. Lawmakers instead focused on pumping up per-student spending overall and letting districts decide how to deploy it.

Now special education funding is back in the spotlight at the Legislature, thanks to a full court press from heavyweight groups including the Oregon Education Association and the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators.

Under its current system, Oregon pays districts twice as much per pupil for a special education student as for a nondisabled one but limits the number who can qualify for double funding to 11% of a district’s overall student body, a metric set in the 1990s. This year, the state pays an extra $9,620 for each of those students, according to the Oregon Department of Education’s school finance expert, Mike Wiltfong.

But statewide, school districts have determined about 14.5% of students qualify for such help, which can range from weekly meetings with a speech pathologist to daily literacy tutoring sessions to combat dyslexia to bell-to-bell care from a one-on-one aide for students with especially high needs.

Districts say those costs can cannibalize funding available for the rest of the student body. (Districts with students who have particularly high needs, costing more than $30,000 a year for a single student, have access to a separate fund to help cover those bills. But it too has limits: $55 million is available per year.)

The number of Oregon students with autism diagnoses has doubled in the last 15 years, and the number of young children diagnosed with developmental delays have gone up threefold, Wiltfong told the House Education Committee Wednesday.

Advocates want to raise the 11% cap to 15%. In his testimony, Wiltfong said allowing more students to qualify for double funding should bring an increase in funding of about $376 million.

One reason that the 11% rate has stayed steady for so long, Wiltfong acknowledged during Wednesday’s hearing, is that previous generations of lawmakers feared “overidentification” — districts qualifying more students than actually need special education services to draw the maximum allowable state funding.

In Oregon, no one checks to see that the extra funding districts receive for special education students — or for students navigating poverty or learning English as a second language or any other special category — is actually spent on those students versus spent on general education costs.

Gov. Tina Kotek has already proposed a meaningful boost of around $1.1 billion to school funding for the coming two years, for a total of $11.3 billion for the state school fund.

Should lawmakers agree to both Kotek’s proposed K-12 education budget and to raise the special education cap and fund it at the level suggested by the Oregon Department of Education, that would mean a state school fund of nearly $11.7 billion — a big ask amid competing priorities, including wildfire prevention, transportation infrastructure and affordable housing.

That would represent a 14.7% increase in the state school fund from the current two-year budget, and it does not include other state funding for schools, including hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarked funding for social-emotional supports and academic equity programs that come from a corporate tax for education.

Huge growth in numbers

Dylan Tanner, a special education teacher at Templeton Elementary School in Tigard, said he and his colleagues have seen a huge growth in numbers and need since he started there in 2009. Back then, he said, there were perhaps 40 students who needed special education services at any given time, the bulk of whom needed academic support.

Now about 90 students at Templeton have individual education plans, he said, the majority of whom have significant behavioral needs. Special education is what stands between them and the punitive disciplinary actions that once would have defined their time in the school system, Tanner said.

“We know what is research-based and, from our experience, what works for kids. We know how to improve the quality of life for kids, especially little dudes coming into kindergarten,” Tanner said. “But when there are so many kids, you cannot do it the right way all the time. I know we could do better. I know we could be more successful. Look, we get through the day. Everyone is safe. Most kids go home smiling. But we can’t ever catch up enough to meet all of their needs.”

Yonatan Schultz, parent of a fourth-grader at Portland Public Schools’ Duniway Elementary in Southeast Portland, spoke up at a budget forum attended by Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong and lawmakers last Monday. His daughter, Schultz said, had “explosive behavior issues” when she returned to school buildings after the pandemic, and their family had to fight “tooth and nail” to get her a dedicated paraeducator so that she could stay at her neighborhood school.

“Even with these supports, her access to education has been difficult and choppy,” Schultz said. “If she had been placed in an environment in which her explosive behavior was meant with restraints, I don’t think she would be the happy child that I am so honored to know today. If the budget does not exist for paraeducators, what option would my daughter have had other than to be removed from general education?”

The Tigard-Tualatin school district, where Tanner teaches, has about 12% of its student body who are eligible for special education. In Hillsboro and Gresham, it is 15%; in the Salem-Keizer School District and at Portland Public Schools, it is 18%.

Bills to potentially raise the special education student cap past 11% and increase grant funding for disabled students were scheduled for initial public hearings before the House Education Committee on Monday in Salem. Ultimately, the powerful budget-writing Joint Ways & Means Committee will decide how much money to allocate to schools. That decision normally is not reached until the closing days of the five-month-long session.