Despite its overall enrollment stagnating, the district has added more than 2,000 students to its special education programming since the 2014-15 school year, according to data from the Texas Education Agency, or TEA.
As a result, the district is looking to keep up with that trend, allocating more resources and hiring more professionals into its special education programming, district officials said.
Meanwhile, advocacy groups and school districts, including CCISD, are looking to the state for more help on funding and programming to help meet student needs.
"We've been allocating more of our general local funds toward special education to meet the needs," CCISD Chief Communications Officer Elaina Polsen said. "It's one of our highest legislative priorities in this next session to seek additional funding for special education."
The overview
CCISD has 6,647 students in the special services department, which oversees students enrolled in special education, for the 2024-25 school year, CCISD Communications Coordinator Sydney Hunt said in an Oct. 7 email.
There are several ways a student can be eligible to receive special education services, according to the district’s special services website. Among those include a child having autism, deaf-blindness, an intellectual disability, a health impairment, a speech or language impairment, or a specific learning disability.
Special education has been a challenge for Texas as a whole, as the state in recent years has expanded how many students qualify for special education, according to officials across different special needs advocacy groups in Texas. This change has led to many districts, including CCISD, to see an increase in the number of students they must serve, which is creating other funding challenges.
For CCISD, meeting the need has included assessments of its programming, hiring more staff and providing more resources to its special education programs.
“We were addressing any [service] shortages in more creative ways than we ever have before. We’ve changed a support model into a more coaching model,” said Michele Staley, CCISD’s executive director of special services. “Students get better when teachers get better, so professional learning is at the core of our philosophy.”
Students with disabilities who are part of general education classrooms and instruction are calculated in the average daily attendance, or ADA, allotment from the state, which has been $6,160 per student since 2019, according to TEA documents.
The amount the state gives for special education students is weighted differently based on the accommodations the student receives, TEA documents show.
Services CCISD offers for special education students include alternative academics, which modifies academic instruction in a small group setting; extended school year services; homebound services; and a cooperative for students who are deaf and hard of hearing, among others.
The district’s board of trustees approved additional staffing for the special services department, which cost $245,000 through the district’s general funds, at its Sept. 9 meeting due to an increase in enrollment in elementary students in special services.
These additions filled seven paraprofessional positions for the alternative academics and resource/inclusion programs. Three full-time employees and one part-time employee were hired to fill all seven positions, district agenda documents show.
Since the 2014-15 school year, the enrollment for elementary students in the special services department has increased by nearly 64%, TEA data shows. That student population has increased at a faster rate than the number of special education employees within the district.
Staley said enrollment in special education increased in 2018 after the TEA required school districts to provide parents with the option to provide special education services to students with dyslexia.
Zooming out
Special education has been a challenge for Texas, said Jolene Sanders, advocacy director for the nonprofit Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, an advocacy organization for people with disabilities in Texas, according to its website.
The state has seen a spike in students needing special education, which came after a series of investigations and lawsuits dating back to the late 2010s that found Texas was not providing special education services to enough students, Sanders said.
Previously, Texas had a cap on the number of students a school district could classify as needing special education at 8.5%, Sanders said. Since removing the cap in 2017, that number across the state has increased from around 9% of students to 14% during the 2023-24 school year. For the U.S., the average number of students receiving special education services is 15%, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
From 2017-21, Texas saw a 21% spike in students needing special education, TEA data shows, the highest increase of any state. The second highest was less than 12%, and the national average was 3%.
Sanders said this correction has not only led to more students in special education but has created more challenges with funding. Advocacy group Disabilities Rights Texas noted in a 2023 report school districts funded $6.3 billion worth of special education programs in 2020-21, which the state paid for $4 billion of, creating a $2.3 billion gap in funding.
In their own words
CCISD parents Christina Bui and Nicole Hayes both have children who have received years of special education programming at CCISD. Both described their experience as overwhelmingly positive.
For Hayes, her child is now in 11th grade. She said her child for the most part is no longer in need of those resources and classes. While the first few years of service were a challenge, things turned a corner when she transferred her child to a structured learning lab while in elementary school. The lab is geared toward individualized intervention for social and communication skills, according to the district's website.
"There has been challenges and a progression, but overall I'm satisfied with our journey," Hayes said. "... When we got [my child] in the right program and [with] the right people, ... it really helped lighten the load."
For Bui, whose daughter is a senior, she said the district has gone out of its way to "bend over backwards" for her.
For parent Alyssa Beach, who has a fifth grade child, she said it’s been a challenge over the past few years to get the resources her child needed, saying district assessments said he wasn’t in need of special education programming. It wasn't until she and her husband, Chris, had their child tested from a third party that she said they were finally able to get their child in the necessary programming. Beach called the journey to getting her child the services a "big fight."
“We were thankful for his teachers,” Beach said. “Without them pushing, we may have just stopped and allowed this to be overlooked and treated more as a behavioral issue.”
In follow-up questions to how the district evaluates students, Denise Cummins, CCISD director of Special Education Support Services, said in an Oct. 21 email to Community Impact the district is looking specifically at a student’s needs in an educational setting. This can lead to times where a student may have a medical diagnosis but doesn’t meet the criteria for an educational disability condition.
She added that the district evaluates independent evaluations and consults with teachers and service providers to determine if more services are needed.
“As a district, we always encourage parents to share outside evaluations and information from their own service providers," Cummins said in the email. "We see this as a positive and collaborative process between the school and families.”
Looking ahead
In 2018, education consultant and research group Gibson recommended in a report 27 ways for CCISD to improve its special services department. Of those, nine have been implemented, including improved communication with parents, monitoring and tracking practices, and more training opportunities for teachers, according to district documents.
CCISD is waiting on the district’s systematic review of the special education department by the TEA, which reviews all local education agencies across the state over a six-year period, according to a presentation from the district presented at the board of trustees’ Sept. 9 meeting.
The review for CCISD began on Aug. 30, Staley said.
Meanwhile, CCISD officials and special needs advocates said they are looking to the upcoming legislative session in February and hoping for some changes to both funding and the special education model.
Sanders said she believes the current model, which bases much of the funding districts get on the physical placement of a student, is “woefully inadequate.” Instead, advocates are looking to a service intensity model, which would base services for individual students around their specific needs—and providing funding based on that.
The 2023 session did not net much in the way of public education funding, Sanders said. Many bills were left on the cutting-room floor due to, in many cases, officials attaching items to them that weren’t as popular, she said.
Going into the upcoming legislative session, Sanders said she and other advocates are hoping for key changes in special education, namely the service intensity model.
“The [current] model hasn’t been revised in over 30 years,” she said. “[Legislators] are fighting back and forth because everyone wants their bills passed and their priorities. And somehow special [education] funding ends up being a bargaining tool. And nobody has won so far.”
