SFUSD Pays Millions for Special Ed. This Change Could Save Money — and Help Families

As the San Francisco Unified School District still has a long-term budget problem despite widespread cuts, it could look to save money by revisiting the way it handles special education — an idea that many families are hesitant to get their hopes up for but desperately want to believe.

Amid dwindling enrollment and state funding, SFUSD is still hemorrhaging cash, spending outside its means this year, and expecting to run another deficit of nearly $60 million next year without restoring cut positions and services. Superintendent Maria Su told reporters last month that one of the drivers of the district’s annual shortfalls is the ballooning cost of special education, particularly for the 12% or so of special education students who require services the district has opted to outsource.

SFUSD is federally mandated to be responsible for all students’ special education within its geographical region, or SELPA, but the district alone cannot provide all services. It has about 200 students in private school programs that enroll students with individualized learning plans (IEPs) whose needs cannot be met by their public school district.

Next year, SFUSD estimates that it will pay $42.1 million to these non-public school programs, along with other independent agencies and consultants that provide special education services.

Su believes that expanding the district’s internal special education services could recoup some of this funding. It could also improve the learning experience for students who require nontraditional services.

“If SFUSD could find more options for kids like my son, families like [ours] would take it in a heartbeat,” said Havah Kelley, whose child has been in a non-public school program for three years.

“I want my son to go to a local public school,” she told KQED. “I want to be a part of that community. I want my son to be part of the community. I want him to meet friends who actually live in San Francisco and aren’t spread out, so he can never connect.”

Kelley’s son, who is entering ninth grade in the fall, has had an IEP since he was 3. He attended elementary school in a regular SFUSD classroom, but as he was gearing up for middle school, Kelley noticed him falling behind, despite the extra resources he had already received through the district’s special education department.

“He was just not making progress,” she said. “COVID hit, and that really, really derailed us further. Staffing shortages hit, it was a culmination of many different things happening at once, but by … the beginning of sixth grade, I was very gravely concerned.”

That summer, Kelley, who is a member of the district’s community advisory commission for special education, said she initiated the long, stressful process of moving her son into a non-public school program (NPS).

She requested a meeting with the special education team who’d worked with her family throughout her son’s education, and said she had to prove that the district couldn’t provide legally mandated resources, she told KQED.

Once SFUSD officials agreed that Kelley’s son needed an NPS placement, the district referred her to one program, where she and her son went through an application process similar to a private school — written questionnaire, interviews and a school tour — before hearing whether he would be offered a spot.

Parents don’t get much choice in which NPS their child attends, which can also stir up frustration and sometimes lead to costly lawsuits.

Instead, Kelley said, SFUSD refers families to one school at a time, and at the end of the application process, the parent can only decide whether to accept or reject the placement.

If they feel it’s the wrong fit, they start again from square one.

“It’s very rarely a straight shot,” Kelley said.

A difficult path back to SFUSD

California has 265 certified NPS programs. Some, like the one Kelley’s son attends, provide smaller student-to-teacher ratios and more individualized attention than SFUSD’s general education classrooms can offer, but less extensive services than some of its internal special day classes, which Kelley said would be too restrictive.

Others, such as Edgewood Community School, are geared toward students who need significant mental health support.

The San Francisco campus serves high school students who have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, PTSD and other mental health conditions, according to program director Roberto Orozco.

“The class schedule that we create for the students is individualized to make sure that they’re able to make up for the lost credit that they may have not accrued throughout their high school careers,” he said, adding that when they come to Edgewood, “a lot of the students have been out of school for anywhere from months to sometimes years.”

Academic courses, coupled with in-house individual, group and family therapy and case management, are geared toward two tracks — one to graduate from Edgewood, and another to move to a general education classroom in SFUSD.

Orozco said that while seven students graduated from Edgewood last month, many are working toward returning to general education classrooms.

“Once progress has been made and maintained, we’re able to start having [students] go to a general education setting, where they’ll be there for about an hour,” he said. “They’ll come back, and then if it all goes well, after a month we increase the time … until finally the student is able to return to the least restrictive setting in their general education high school.”

This year though, no students were able to step down from Edgewood’s program, which isn’t a unique problem.

“When [my son] started, I was hopeful that he would go back to San Francisco for high school,” Kelley said.

She initially thought he would be out of the district for one to two years while he caught up after distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and got some targeted support. But next year will be her son’s fourth in an NPS.

“It’s really, really hard,” she told KQED.

Outside services pose a major cost

To get to his school, Kelley’s son travels three hours round-trip each day. She said that in addition to isolating them from other SFUSD families, the commute has affected her son’s attendance.

“He’s exhausted having to get up at 5:30 [or] 5:45 in the morning and not getting home until almost 5 o’clock,” she said. That’s without participating in any extracurriculars or hanging around after school with friends.

Long travel days are also a strain on the district.

SFUSD is required to pay for transportation for students at NPS programs, which are spread throughout the state, often hours away from San Francisco. Only two of the state-approved programs are within city limits.

Transportation often represents the biggest part of NPS programs’ cost to the district, Kelley said.

That price tag is getting higher, Su said, as more students require outside services.

“The reason why we’re spending so much money on special education is because we’re providing funding to serve our students outside of the district,” she said. “Imagine if we can serve these students inside the district, we can then keep these resources here.”

In addition to transportation, the district pays for private school tuition, case managers who are SFUSD employees and serve as liaisons between the district and NPS schools, and for settlements to families who have sued the district over its inability to provide adequate services.

When parents have conflicts with the district over their child’s IEP and the services they’re allotted, lawsuits can arise, Kelley said.

“If a parent is upset about something … sometimes they just go straight for [legal action],” she said. “They’re just done and they don’t want to have these conversations.”

If the parents win a settlement, they can enroll their student in a private or parochial school that the district has to pay for. Currently, there are about 400 special education students in the district’s region in these schools.

The district is also in legal heat after a special education fiasco left nearly 200 students without required teachers and services at the start of the school year. The misstep is estimated to cost the district more than $1.18 million to pay for the unmet services, plus legal fees and additional resources to determine the cause of the blunder and make amends with families.

Su turns focus to special education

Su said now that she’s completed her first school year as the superintendent, working to balance a massive budget deficit and rebuild families’ trust, she’s looking at how special education — and possibly school mergers and closures — factor into the district’s future.

“What I’m going to do next year is review and survey all of our facilities and determine which facilities can be converted to transitional kindergarten classrooms and … which facilities can be used to serve our special education students,” she said. “Then at the end of the day … if we have to close or merge, we will determine that, but at a later time.”

A review of SFUSD’s special education earlier this year by FCMAT, a financial company tasked with assisting California districts with financial management, recommended that the district assess where it might be able to shift kids whose NPS programs provide similar services into a district or county-operated class.

While many special education regions cover multiple school districts, SFUSD is the only district in San Francisco’s geographic area. Because of this, it doesn’t look at county-operated special education programs the way others do, according to FCMAT’s analysis.

County classes can be a placement between NPS and SFUSD-operated programs, offering different student-to-teacher ratios and levels of support for students with similar needs currently placed in various NPS programs.

“This lack of differentiation does not occur in most other [special education areas], and it may be causing the SFUSD to miss an opportunity to meet students’ needs in a [district or county] class instead of placing them in a more expensive and restrictive environment like an NPS,” FCMAT Executive Director Mike Fine said in an email.

“Our sense is that SFUSD could bring quite a few students back from an NPS, at a significant savings, but the specifics of this are well beyond our analysis,” he added.

“Oftentimes, as you’re looking at keeping students in [the] least restrictive environment, you can create programs that have different class size ratios, different types of support from specialists, and maybe perhaps serve more students in a district program as opposed to a non-public school,” Carolynne Beno, a FCMAT analyst, told SFUSD’s board of education in March.

Although some students will continue to need services the district can’t provide, Kelley said the idea of returning to a district school is hopeful.

“I really want for SFUSD to have more options for kids like my son who are just a little more complicated,” she said.

She said that expanded in-district options would help catch some of the kids like hers, who “fall through the cracks” of SFUSD’s offerings.

“His needs were more expensive than [general education] could provide, but [special day classes] were not appropriate because his needs were not as severe in some cases for [that] model, so it would be too restrictive,” she said.

How the district plans to expand its options for special education beyond identifying classrooms isn’t yet clear, but the district said it is “committed to transforming how we support our students, families and staff.”

“The structural and systemic improvements that are already underway are not just necessary — they are long overdue, especially given the threats against the U.S. Department of Education,” district officials said in a statement. “We will continue to push forward with urgency and unwavering dedication.”