The Texas Education Agency released a comprehensive draft strategic plan March 19 in response to a Jan. 11 report in which the U.S. Department of Education found the TEA failed to ensure all special education students in the state were given access to services.

According to the federal report, the TEA failed to identify, locate and evaluate children with disabilities and to monitor school districts to ensure they met requirements laid out in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Action steps laid out in the draft plan include executing a statewide professional development system for all educators, improving dyslexia-specific support services, continuing a collaboration with the Texas Workforce Commission related to workforce preparation and readiness, and ensuring the availability of bilingual evaluators, educational diagnosticians and school psychologists.

“The purpose of special education is to provide sufficient support to our students with disabilities on an individualized basis so that they can obtain the same level of academic success typical of their peers,” TEA officials stated in the draft strategic plan’s executive summary. “Working together, we will significantly improve outcomes for our special education students.”

The heart of the TEA’s violation can be tied to an 8.5 percent indicator set in 2004 as a general target for the number of students a school district should have who are receiving special education services. Although TEA officials said the number was not an enforced requirement, the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs found it caused some school districts to take actions intended to decrease the percentage to 8.5 percent or lower. The indicator was eliminated in 2016.

Although the state’s student population increased by more than 1 million from the 2003-04 school year to the 2016-17 school year, the special education population decreased by 32,000 students.

In Tomball ISD, about 9.1 percent of students received services in 2003-04, TISD officials said. About 8.1 percent of students enrolled in 2017-18 were identified as special education students, district officials said.

In Magnolia ISD, 8.4 percent of students enrolled in 2016-17 were identified as special education students, according to TEA data. This is a decrease from the 12 percent of students receiving services in 2003-04. However, the total number of students receiving services has varied between 8.4 percent and 13 percent since 2003-04.

“While the strategic plan was required for [the] TEA to fix their monitoring, our practice as a district is to continue to make every effort to identify students that need special education services,” MISD Director of Communications Denise Meyers said. “This practice has not changed, as we do what is best for each child.”