In the midst of a statewide controversy regarding Texas Education Agency monitoring standards, Katy ISD officials said the district seeks to remain a destination district for special education as well as gifted and talented students.

Unlike state numbers, KISD’s executive director of special education Brian Malechuk said the district’s special education enrollment has increased by nearly two percent over the last six years. He said any student in need of special education services has access at KISD.

“Whatever the programming is, it’s about what’s the best for that child,” Malechuk said. “There was never an expectation in Katy [ISD] that we wouldn’t serve every kid that needed to be served.”

The TEA received a letter of inquiry on Oct. 3 from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services regarding its supposed implementation of an 8.5 percent special education enrollment cap for Texas school districts.

The TEA’s Performance-Based Monitoring Analysis System serves as an annual indicator of success for public school districts and charter schools in a variety of areas, such as special education, English as a second language, and career and technical education.

Of the elements contained in the performance reports, the TEA has identified the “standard” for special education enrollment—also known as special education indicator 10—as 8.5 percent of a district’s total enrollment.

The Education Department reached out to Gene Lenz, the TEA’s division director of federal and state education policy, to discuss the special education indicator in 2014.

“Mr. Lenz explained that this indicator was established to address the state’s concern that some districts were inappropriately over-identifying students as students with disabilities,” wrote the department’s Acting Assistant Secretary Sue Swenson in the Oct. 3 letter.

While the TEA maintained in its Nov. 2 response to the Education Department that it has never established any cap, Swenson said in the letter that “some districts view the 8.5 percent PBMAS monitoring standard as a cap on the number of children with disabilities that may be identified in a district.”

State Rep. John Zerwas, R-Richmond, of Texas House District 28 represents four school districts, including KISD. Zerwas said he is unhappy with the TEA’s 8.5 percent special education monitoring standard and often uses KISD as an example of a school district with a successful special education program.   

“What appears to have happened is that we have … let some people fall through the cracks,” Zerwas said. “It does kind of speak well for [KISD] that they are tuned in to bringing the appropriate resources to all their kids out there and don’t find themselves held hostage to any certain quotas.”

Unofficial caps

Since the TEA instituted its performance-based reporting system, statewide special education enrollment has decreased from 11.6 percent in 2004 to roughly 8.5 percent each year since 2012.

The drop in enrollment has the Education Department concerned about a perceived failure on the part of Texas school districts to provide an “appropriate” public education for all students.

“It appears that the state’s approach to monitoring local educational agency compliance under PBMAS Indicator 10 may be resulting in districts’ failure to identify and evaluate all students of having a disability and who need special education and related services,” Swenson said.

The TEA was given a 30-day window to respond to the Education Department regarding the allegations and to detail its corrective action. Penny Schwinn, the TEA’s deputy commissioner of academics, said in a Nov. 2 response letter the “TEA has never set a cap, limit or policy on the number or percent of students that districts can, or should, serve in special education.”

However, Schwinn said in the response letter a district possessing a special education enrollment of 15.1 percent or more can lead to TEA intervention.

“The PBMAS special education representation rate indicator includes four ranges. Only one of those ranges (15.1 percent and above) is ever used by TEA as a sole determinant for districts’ interventions staging,” Schwinn said in the letter. “Interventions staging is not a TEA sanction. On the contrary, districts engage in interventions activities locally through a continuous improvement model.”

Classifying students

Malechuk, who has been at KISD since 2012, said the TEA has never intervened or penalized the district for exceeding the 8.5 percent special education enrollment threshold. KISD’s special education enrollment decreased from 9.9 percent in 2004 to 7.7 percent in 2010, according to TEA reports. Since then, KISD has steadily increased enrollment to 9.4 percent—or roughly 7,100 students—for the 2016-17 school year, Malechuk said.

Malechuk attributed these changes to the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, also known as IDEA, which details procedures for identifying students with learning disabilities.

According to Malechuk, the decline in KISD’s special education enrollment between 2004 and 2010 is directly correlated to the 2004 IDEA amendment, which contains an intervention model that offers assistance to at-risk students who may not be classified as “learning disabled” and may not require special education services.

Malechuk said KISD’s learning disabled population has decreased by roughly 4 percent since 2012. He said tools like the intervention model are instrumental to school districts’ special education programs because they allow for a more sophisticated method of classifying students. Not all students identified with a potential learning disability at a young age go on to enter the special education program.

“Our learning disabled population has gone down quite a bit across the state and nation because of response intervention,” Malechuk said. “We don’t want to label a child if it’s unnecessary.”

KISD received the best possible performance score last year based on its 2014-15 special education graduation rate of 80.1 percent. To keep up with the increased enrollment, the KISD board approved 17 new special education positions—16 paraprofessionals and one teacher—at its Oct. 24 meeting.

Malechuk said KISD’s special education program serves students ages 3 to 21, while the county-operated Early Childhood Intervention Project TYKE serves children age 3 and younger living within KISD boundaries. Project TYKE is especially important, as it allows for the early identification of disabilities and often gets children the assistance they need to test out of special education—at a rate of 37 percent—and later obtain a traditional education, he said.

On the gifted and talented program side, Alene Lindley, KISD’s director of gifted and talented and advanced academics, said the TEA enforces a funding cap on districts when its GATE program enrollment reaches 5 percent of its total student population. However, KISD covers the remainder of what is not funded by the state, she said.

KISD historically has had a GATE program enrollment of 6.5 to 7.5 percent. The district began the 2016-17 school year with roughly 5,600 students enrolled in the GATE program, translating to 7.51 percent of KISD’s total enrollment, Lindley said.

Looking ahead

With the 85th legislative session upcoming in January, several issues related to special education and GATE programs are expected to be discussed, district officials and legislators said.

Malechuk said he expects Senate Bill 507 to top the list of potential points of contention. Passed by the Legislature in 2015, SB 507 dictates that—upon the request of a parent, a school board member or campus personnel—school districts must install audio and video equipment in classrooms in which 50 percent of the students require special education services for at least half of the school day.

“We need clarity on some of the pieces of the law so we’re ensuring that we’re actually implementing it correctly,” Malechuk said. “Everyone’s doing it a little bit differently because we all kind of had to figure our own way out because there weren’t any set guidelines.”   

The district has already received 19 requests for special education classroom cameras. Sixteen cameras have been installed at a cost of over $100,000 to KISD, district spokesperson Maria DiPetta said.

KISD’s board approved the district’s official legislative priorities at its Dec. 5 meeting, which was drafted by the Legislative Priorities Advisory Committee.

Of the four priorities approved, one addresses unfunded state mandates like special education classroom cameras where the state has requested district spending but has not allocated funds. Another addresses the 8.5 percent monitoring standard.

With the Education Department informing the TEA that it will examine other indicators related to the identification of children with disabilities, the TEA has said it will stop using Indicator 10.

Zerwas said TEA monitoring is likely to be discussed, but he is unsure how much progress will be made. Cameras in special education classrooms and other unfunded mandates are among his top priorities.

“Where there are places that we can either remove the mandate or provide the funding, then we ought to try to do that,” Zerwas said. “We’re probably going to be more serious about trying to relieve some of the mandates if they’re reasonable to do.”