Feds to question TEA’s special ed services at 5 ‘listening sessions’

AUSTIN — The U.S. Department of Education said Wednesday it is dispatching officials to Texas to ask residents and educators whether the state is illegally denying special education services to students with disabilities.

Department officials said they will hold public “listening sessions” as part of a probe into a large decline in services in the state. The meetings will take place in Houston and the Dallas area on Dec. 12, in Edinburg and El Paso on Dec. 13, and in Austin on Dec. 15.

Those unable to attend the meetings will be able to submit written comments online, the department said.

“The sessions provide members of the public an opportunity to comment on the timely identification and evaluation of students with disabilities, as well as the delivery of special education and related services to all eligible children,” the department said.

The Texas Education Agency confirmed the events, saying it helped choose the locations and will have representatives at each stop.

The listening sessions will continue a federal probe launched earlier this year in response to a Houston Chronicle investigation that revealed the TEA arbitrarily decided in 2004 that only 8.5 percent of students should get special education services such as counseling,

tutoring and therapy, and that in the years since, the agency has audited school districts for serving too many children.

Schools have responded by dramatically curtailing services, dropping the percentage of students in special education from near the national average of 13 percent to exactly 8.5 percent. That is the lowest of any state in the country, by far.

‘Cap’ in question

No other state has set a target for special education enrollment, the Chronicle found. Texas set its target while facing a $1.1 billion state budget cut and without consulting the federal government, state lawmakers or any research.

In response to the revelations, the U.S. Department of Education ordered the TEA to end the benchmark unless it could prove that no children with disabilities have been deprived of services. Federal officials also asked the state to come up with a plan to “remedy” the past denial of services.

The TEA told the federal government it immediately would suspend and eventually eliminate the benchmark. But it also vigorously defended the policy, saying it was not a “cap” on students allowed to get special education services, was not designed to save money and that the agency did not seriously punish districts that gave services to more than 8.5 percent of students.

The TEA has attributed the dramatic drop in special education students to new teaching techniques that it says have lowered the number of children with “learning disabilities,” such as dyslexia.

More than 150 current and former Texas school teachers and administrators have told the Chronicle they interpreted the benchmark as a strict ban on serving more than 8.5 percent of students. Nearly 100 educators have admitted that they have delayed or denied services to disabled kids to try to comply with the policy. About 100 special education experts have said the new teaching techniques almost certainly cannot explain the decline in students because they have been implemented nationwide and have not led to a reduction in any other state.

‘Cannot be trusted’

On Wednesday, experts and advocates for children with disabilities said they were hopeful the public meetings would show the disastrous consequences of the TEA policy.

“Understanding the human casualties of TEA’s misguided special education cap requires meeting families of students who have been denied services,” said Dustin Rynders of Disability Rights Texas, an advocacy group that has said it does not trust the TEA to eliminate the benchmark. “When they share their stories, it will be clear to all who attend that we are dealing with a crisis that TEA cannot be trusted to fix on their own.”

State Senate Minority Leader José Rodríguez, who has filed legislation to prohibit the use of any special education enrollment target, said he also expects the listening sessions will clear up the debate over the policy.

“It’s very welcomed,” said Rodríguez, D-El Paso. “The TEA has maintained that this was not an effort to reduce the numbers, but everything we’ve heard from all quarters is that it was, in fact, interpreted as a hard cap. I think that is going to come out in these sessions.”