Funding for Special Education

Re “District Wins Bid Not to Pay for Deaf Boy’s Private School,” March 15:

Capistrano Unified wishes to serve all children in our school district, including hearing-impaired children, with the highest-quality programs available within the funding limits provided by the state. It must be pointed out that school boards have no independent ability to levy taxes or generate revenue.

We in the Capistrano Unified School District were pleased with the judge’s decision, which represented an important public policy statement: essentially that school districts would not be responsible for paying for extra and costly services that clearly go beyond the “appropriate” public education granted to all children.

We adopted this position not because we don’t want to provide such services--as expensive as they are--but [because] the costs for such services far exceed the state revenue generated for serving these students.

With K-12 state educational funding being a zero-sum game, school districts being forced to fund inordinately expensive additional services for a subset of our students leads to serious equity problems for all students.

One of the most serious problems facing America’s public education today is the escalation of special education costs beyond the dollars allocated to school districts to provide such services.

This, in turn, leads to an increasing encroachment into the educational funds for regular education children, who do not enjoy the extraordinary rights and regulatory guarantees that special education students are granted by the federal government.

In Capistrano Unified, for example, the difference between the revenue we receive to serve special education students and the costs to provide such services is $4.5 million.

To fit that funding deficit into perspective, if we had that funding in the general fund budget, we could reduce class size to 20:1 in all elementary school grades throughout our district (not just K-3).

If the judicial ruling had gone the other way, this encroachment would escalate out of sight.

JAMES FLEMING

Superintendent, CUSD

San Juan Capistrano