DPI announced this week that initial special education payments would reimburse schools for their special education costs at 35%. A hallway in La Follette High School in Madison. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

Initial special education reimbursement payments to school districts this year will be about 35% of their costs — about 7 percentage points below the estimated rate approved in the state budget.

When the 2025-27 state budget was passed by the state Legislature and signed by Gov. Tony Evers in July, policymakers boasted that their investments would bring the special education reimbursement rate to a historic 42% in the first year of the budget and 45% in the second year. 

While school districts will still receive more aid for special education costs this year than in previous state budgets, it appears that the state funding set aside probably won’t be enough to reach the rate that was estimated when the budget was signed in July.

The Department of Public Instruction (DPI) announced in a bulletin on Monday that initial special education payments for November through March would reimburse schools 35% of their special education costs. While DPI uses a slightly lower rate to avoid overpayment and this is not the final reimbursement rate, Chris Bucher, DPI director of communications, said in an email that the agency has anticipated the rate falling below the estimate.

Special education reimbursement rates for public school districts can vary from the estimate because it is a sum certain allocation, meaning that payments come from a fixed pot of money.

During the budget process, public education advocates, DPI and Gov. Tony Evers called for that to change to a sum sufficient allocation, meaning that the amount of money provided by the state would be enough to meet the set reimbursement rate. Republican lawmakers rejected the request.

Bucher said having a lower reimbursement rate than what is estimated has been relatively typical with budgets, given that there is a fixed amount of state funding as well as a rising amount of unaided special education costs and a rising number of students with disabilities.

According to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo released Thursday, in 2024-25 the state had appropriated about $574 million to special education aid. When the 2023-25 state budget was passed, the appropriation was estimated to bring schools to a 33.3% rate in each year of the budget. In November 2024, DPI estimated a rate of 29.16%, and the final rate for that school year was 30.64%.

Based on cost increases in recent years, DPI projected costs would grow by 4% for its 2025-27 state budget request. It had estimated that aidable costs would be about $1.8 billion in 2025-26 and $1.9 billion in 2026-27. Those estimates were also used as Evers prepared his budget request and as the Legislature prepared the budget. 

According to the new memo, DPI now projects that aidable costs in 2024-25 increased by an estimated 9% — a rate more than twice the original projection when the 2025-27 budget was being drafted.

For the 2025-27 state budget, the DPI requested about $2 billion across the biennium to cover special education costs for school at a rate of 90% by the second year of the budget and to change the funding from “sum certain” to “sum sufficient.”

Gov. Tony Evers also requested the change from sum certain to sum sufficient, though he requested increasing it to a 60% rate by the second year. The Joint Committee on Finance denied those requests instead choosing to provide $207 million in the first year of the budget to cover an estimated 42% of costs and $297 million in the second year to cover costs at an estimated rate of 45%.

Advocates called attention to the reimbursement rate in statements this week, saying the funding system needs an overhaul.

Peggy Wirtz-Olsen, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union, blamed the rate on lawmakers, saying that they “turned their backs on our most vulnerable children, failing to deliver on promised special education funding and leaving our students without the supports they need to succeed in school.” 

“This shortfall will mean even more communities forced into holding school referendums in 2026 just to meet basic needs, causing uncertainty and hardship for students who deserve better from their elected leaders,” Wirtz-Olsen said in a statement. 

Wirtz-Olsen said lawmakers have been “caught lying about the scant resources they are providing.” 

“It’s time for these politicians to fix Wisconsin’s school funding formula and fulfill what the state Constitution requires,” she said. “Taxpayers have had enough of picking up the tab on our property taxes to make up for their refusal to fund schools. If they won’t take action for the students who most need help, educators and families will.” 

Beth Swedeen, executive director of the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities, called on the state to change the way it funds school districts. 

“It’s time to build a budget that is rooted in real costs and can provide budget certainty to schools and parents that the promises made by the legislature will translate into real dollars schools can use,” Swedeen said in a statement. “We should not be in this position cycle after cycle where students with disabilities and schools are undercut by accounting codes.”

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A father holds his son's hand during the Disability Pride Parade in New York City. Advocates fear changes made, or proposed, by the Trump administration will strip away crucial federal oversight and deny vulnerable children the educational services they’re guaranteed under law. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

In its quest to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, the Trump administration wants to let states police themselves when it comes to educating students with disabilities, a move many teachers and parents fear will strip away crucial federal oversight and deny vulnerable children the services they’re guaranteed under law.

In October, the Trump administration fired nearly all the employees in the U.S. Department of Education office that’s responsible for enforcing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the landmark federal civil rights law that guarantees students with disabilities the right to a free and quality public education. A federal judge blocked the layoffs a few days later, in response to a lawsuit filed by federal workers unions.

In addition to making sure states and school districts follow the law, the office distributes billions in federal funding to help states educate students with disabilities such as autism, deafness, developmental delays and dyslexia.

The court ruling halting the layoffs is likely just a temporary setback as Trump proceeds with his broader mission of closing the federal department. Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon have said their goals are to reduce bureaucracy and return more education responsibilities to the states.

Neither the Department of Education nor the White House, which are operating with fewer communications officers because of the government shutdown, responded to Stateline requests for comment.

Congress has never fully funded special education at 40% per-pupil costs promised to states under IDEA. Funding has fluctuated over the years; in 2024, it was about 10.9%. Federal IDEA funding is expected to continue, though without federal oversight from the Education Department.

Disability rights and education advocates worry that most states don’t have the resources — or, in some cases, the will — to adequately police and protect the rights of students with disabilities.

Some states in recent years have failed to provide adequate special education services, prompting investigation from the feds. Just 19 states meet the requirements for serving students with disabilities from ages 3 through 21, according to the most recent annual review from the Department of Education, released in June.

“Shifting all of that to the state and away from the feds is not something we’ve been able to wrap our heads around,” said Quinn Perry, the deputy director of the Idaho School Boards Association.

“Our state education department are excellent people, but that is a huge, drastic shift in workload they’d have to do on compliance,” she said, adding that Idaho is already facing a budget shortfall.

In Iowa, Democratic state Rep. Jennifer Konfrst, the former House minority leader, said she’s concerned that without federal oversight, the state would not hold schools accountable for providing special education services. She pointed to state lawmakers’ willingness to pass Iowa’s relatively new school choice program, which directs taxpayer funding to private school tuition but does not require private schools to provide services to students with disabilities.

“There are no provisions with private school vouchers that they have to provide special education,” she said. “Those kids are left at the public schools, which have been underfunded.”

Funding gaps

IDEA passed 50 years ago this month. Before then, education for children with disabilities depended entirely on where they lived.

They were often refused admission to public and private schools that lacked the resources or the will to properly educate them. Some had to forgo education entirely, while others were shut away in poorly equipped institutions that prioritized containment over learning.

In 2022-2023, about 7.5 million students — 15% of the kids in public schools — received special education services under IDEA, according to the most recent data available from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal agency that collects education data.

The law requires public schools to provide a “free appropriate public education” in the least restrictive environment from birth through age 21 to children and youth with disabilities. That education includes services such as additional time to complete school work, assistive technology, or even a one-on-one aide.

Some supports, such as providing large-print materials or giving a student extra time to complete a task, are low-cost. But others can be expensive for schools to provide. For example, an American Sign Language interpreter might cost $50,000 a year, said Perry, of the Idaho school boards group.

And a recent Idaho state report noted that it costs upward of $100,000 per year to educate some special education students.

Educators there are already pushing for additional funding to help fill a gap — $82.2 million in 2023 — between available state and federal funding for special education and the amount that school districts actually spend.

The state report also found that, unlike the neighboring states of Oregon, Utah and Washington, Idaho doesn’t provide additional state funding for special education beyond the base per-pupil amount allocated by the state.

The federal government currently covers less than 12% of the costs of special education services nationwide, leaving state and local governments to foot the rest, according to the National Education Association, a labor union representing 3 million educators nationally. Without federal oversight, critics fear, nobody will hold states and school districts accountable for not spending enough.

In some states, limited state funding means a disproportionate financial burden lands on individual school districts. On average, local districts are responsible for $8,160 per special education student per year, according to a report released last year by education nonprofit Bellwether that studied funding across 24 states.

The situation is so dire in Idaho that the state superintendent made special education funding her key issue for the state’s upcoming legislative session. She requested $50 million to help close the special education funding gap.

It’s an issue affecting school districts across the nation, said Perry.

“Just because [the feds] are shifting responsibility to states does not alleviate the fact that we still have a federal mandate to provide services to these kids,” Perry said. “IDEA is still the law of the land and your school district is still mandated to meet this law, but with perhaps a sprinkling in of chaos and, in a state like ours, still a gap in funding.”

At times, that funding gap has prompted some states to cut corners.

Rationed services

After a 15-month probe, the U.S. Department of Education found in 2018 that Texas had effectively rationed its special education services, capping the share of public school students who could receive those services at 8.5% of a district’s population, regardless of need and in direct violation of IDEA.

The feds also found that some Texas school districts intentionally identified fewer children as eligible for special education services if the number of those students exceeded the 8.5% threshold.

Though Republican Gov. Greg Abbott subsequently released a statement criticizing local school districts, educators and advocates blamed state legislators for recommending the caps as a way to control special education costs.

“Texas had about 5-7% of students who needed special education but were unilaterally denied it because the state decided that was too expensive,” said Lisa Lightner, a special education advocate and the mother of a student with a disability.

“Without this federal oversight, who’s to stop them from doing that again?”

Just last year, the Department of Education released Virginia from an ongoing investigation it had been under since 2019 for repeatedly failing to resolve complaints by parents of special education students.

The feds found the state had no procedures to ensure a timely resolution process for the complaints, leaving parents with little recourse when their students weren’t receiving needed services.

The federal monitoring ended in December 2024 after Virginia’s education department took corrective measures, including creating its own monitoring division, requiring additional educator training, and changing how the state handles complaints.

This year, states including Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and Mississippi were cited by the Education Department for not having systems in place that are “reasonably designed” to identify districts not complying with IDEA.

“No state gets it perfect all the time, but some states are better at it than others,” Lightner said.

Her home state of Pennsylvania has robust state oversight of special education, she said, but added that parents in some other states are panicking.

“There’s a societal mindset in some places that kids who need special education are never going to amount to anything, that they’re a drain on resources. Some people even think [allocating additional funds for their education] is giving them an advantage over other kids,” she said. “It’s an old-fashioned mindset that still exists in a lot of state leaders.”

States take notice

Some state lawmakers, troubled or encouraged by the Trump administration’s stance toward public education, have already filed their own legislation.

Republicans haven’t talked much about special education oversight, but even those at the state level have embraced the larger goal of shrinking the kind of regulation embodied by the Department of Education.

In Texas, state Rep. Andy Hopper, a Republican, filed a bill in February to abolish the state’s education agency.

“President Trump has called upon every level of government to eliminate inefficiencies and waste,” Hopper said in a statement announcing the bill, which later died in committee. “Texans pour billions into this state agency with the expectation that it will somehow improve education, but have been consistently and profoundly disappointed in the results.”

Alabama state Rep. Barbara Drummond, a Democrat, filed a bill in March to study how the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education would affect public education in Alabama.

Alabama parents are among those who sued the federal agency earlier this year over cuts to its Office for Civil Rights, claiming that investigations into alleged civil rights abuses in schools against students with disabilities and English learners have halted since Trump took office. Drummond’s bill also died in committee.

Since August, McMahon has been on a “Returning Education to the States” tour of all 50 states. She began it in Louisiana, the only state whose recent fourth-grade reading scores showed a significant increase compared with pre-pandemic levels, according to a large, congressionally mandated survey of educational progress across the states.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all in education,” she told reporters during her stop at a Baton Rouge school in August. “What works in one state may not work in another state.”

Federal law already gives states and local districts exclusive control over their own curriculum and education standards; the U.S. Department of Education can’t tell states what to teach, nor how to teach it.

Louisiana U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Democrat, expressed concern that the dismantling of the Department of Education would remove the kind of federal oversight that has, in the past, protected students’ civil rights when state and local governments didn’t. On his podcast in August, he pointed to the need for federal intervention during the Jim Crow era when Southern states tried to maintain segregation in schools.

“We were protected to be able to have an education because of the federal government,” said Carter, who is Black. “When you start taking those protections away, that’s damning for our country and it’s a huge step in the wrong direction.”

Lightner, who has 182,000 followers on her Facebook page, said parents who comment on her posts often debate the merits of the Trump administration’s shift on special education.

But Lightner said she hasn’t seen evidence of a cohesive plan to improve special education.

“If you blow up a house, even if I gave you a few hundred thousand dollars to build a new one, that doesn’t happen overnight,” she said. “This destruction, it’s going to be years until we’re back to normal. And even ‘normal’ missed a lot of kids.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

A boy plays with a wooden numbers puzzle. Sensory exercises like this are often used in special education classrooms. (Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Proposed mass layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education have raised alarm among disability advocates and Democratic lawmakers over the potential impact on millions of students with disabilities. 

Advocates warn that the department cannot carry out its legally mandated functions for special education services and support at the staffing levels put forward by President Donald Trump’s proposed reduction in force, or RIF. 

The agency is also reportedly weighing a transfer of special education programs to a different department. 

“If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the fight is just beginning,” Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents Education Department workers, told States Newsroom. “And we’re going to do everything we can to fight these illegal firings and the dismantling of the department, but it is just beginning.”

Trump’s administration took another axe to the department earlier this month amid the ongoing government shutdown, effectively gutting key units that serve students with disabilities. The affected offices administer $15 billion in formula and discretionary grant programs under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, provide guidance and support to families and states and investigate disability-based discrimination complaints, among other responsibilities. 

Though a federal judge has temporarily blocked the administration from carrying out the layoffs, the ruling provides only short-term relief as legal proceedings unfold. 

The administration moved to lay off 465 department employees, including 121 at the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, 132 in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, or OESE, and 137 in the Office for Civil Rights, or OCR. 

The layoffs also hit the Office of the Secretary, Office of Communications and Office of Postsecondary Education. 

“You can’t look at any of this in a silo,” Gittleman said. “When you’re thinking about special education specifically, you also have to think about the fact that OESE, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, also saw an almost full RIF as well.” 

Gittleman called the civil rights office “the place that ensures families have a place to go for help when students are denied access for education based on their disability.”

“That was also almost entirely gutted,” she said. “So you’re debilitating these programs in multiple ways because … kids with disabilities benefit from OESE programs, OCR assistance and OSERS programs.” 

Those three units had already been hit with a separate set of department layoffs earlier this year. 

Parents as advocates

Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc of the United States, an advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said that while IDEA has not been changed and the rights of children with disabilities continue, the government’s ability to enforce and implement those rights has deteriorated. 

OSERS is responsible for managing and supporting IDEA, which guarantees a free public education for students with disabilities and is in its 50th year. The umbrella unit OSERS includes the Office of the Assistant Secretary, Office of Special Education Programs and the Rehabilitation Services Administration.

“You take away the knowledge of the folks at the U.S. Department of Education at the Office of Special Education Programs — the law is complex, the combination of the federal law with state laws is complex — you need that trusted source of accurate information, and so, I think it’s going to make the implementation of this law that much more difficult,” Neas told States Newsroom. 

During the 2022-2023 school year, 7.5 million students in the United States received services through IDEA, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency. 

Neas encouraged parents to “know your rights” and “understand what the law does and does not do for your child, and don’t take no for an answer.” 

She said parents “really have to be well-versed in what the law requires schools to provide to their child,” and “have to be the ones that insist that the law is implemented with fidelity, because they’re the ones that are going to be on the front lines trying to make that happen.” 

‘Flabbergasted’

Jacqueline Rodriguez, CEO at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said the RIFs would make it “impossible” for the Office of Special Education Programs to “carry out its statutory requirements.” 

Rodriguez, whose organization advocates for people with learning and attention issues, said “we had hundreds of staff doing this type of work — the statutory requirements are monitoring, compliance, guidance, support — it’s not just pressing a button and issuing funding.” 

She also noted that advocacy groups, including hers, are “flabbergasted” regarding the sweeping layoffs of special education staff because of the contrast with previous assurances Education Secretary Linda McMahon has made to both Rodriguez and Congress about supporting students with disabilities. 

“I am not stunned that the administration would try to dismantle something that was legally required in place,” she said. “But I am flabbergasted that the secretary would sit and give congressional testimony at her confirmation hearing. She did it at the oversight hearing. She sat in front of me and said, ‘No, Jackie, this administration supports kids with special needs. We will always be good advocates. You don’t have to worry.’”

Just days after the layoff notices were sent out, McMahon took to social media to downplay the consequences of the shutdown on her department.   

Two weeks into the shutdown, “millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid, and schools are operating as normal,” McMahon wrote. 

The secretary added that “it confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states.” 

McMahon also specified that “no education funding is impacted by the RIF, including funding for special education.” 

Rodriguez said McMahon’s post indicates the secretary believes the “status quo is perfectly reasonable — when we know that’s not the case — and she dismantles every opportunity for a kid with a disability to actually have his or her legally-entitled education.”

“I am beyond being polite and providing professional deference because there has been no consideration or deference to kids with disabilities for the last 10 months,” she added.

The groups that advocate for students with disabilities are united in their opposition, Rodriguez continued.

“Disability organizations across the country are united, we are all talking to one another,” she said. “We all work collaboratively, and we are in concert, lock and step.”

Congressional Dems fiercely oppose cuts 

Meanwhile, a slew of Democratic lawmakers expressed outrage and concern over the department RIFs in two separate letters to the administration this month. 

Reps. Lucy McBath of Georgia, Mark DeSaulnier and Lateefah Simon of California, led dozens of fellow House Democrats in an Oct. 17 letter voicing to McMahon and White House budget director Russ Vought their “deep opposition” to the layoffs and urging them to “immediately reverse course and rescind the termination notices that were sent to these workers.”

In another letter to McMahon, 31 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus wrote Monday that “punitive, reckless actions like these latest firings demonstrate how President Trump and …Vought are relishing the government shutdown they caused — and are treating students as political pawns,” adding: “That is outrageous — and flatly unacceptable.”

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, led the letter, along with: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York; Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; and Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, ranking member of the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing Education Department funding.

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building pictured on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Education Department is looking to move the $15 billion Individuals with Disabilities Education Act program outside of the agency, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. 

In a statement to States Newsroom, department spokesperson Madi Biedermann did not explicitly confirm the report, but said the department is generally looking for ways to move its operations to other agencies. President Donald Trump has pledged to eliminate the Education Department.

The agency “is exploring additional partnerships with federal agencies to support special education programs without any interruption or impact on students with disabilities, but no agreement has been signed,” Biedermann wrote. 

Biedermann said Education Secretary Linda McMahon “has been very clear that her goal is to put herself out of a job by shutting down the Department of Education and returning education to the states” and that McMahon is “fully committed to protecting the federal funding streams that support our nation’s students with disabilities.”

Trump’s administration moved to lay off 465 department employees, including 121 at the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, earlier this month amid the ongoing government shutdown.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the administration from carrying out the layoffs, but the ruling provides only short-term relief as legal proceedings unfold. 

The department’s many responsibilities include guaranteeing a free public education for students with disabilities through IDEA.

Trump has already suggested rehousing special education services under the Department of Health and Human Services. 

HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on social media in March that the agency is “fully prepared” to take on that responsibility.

Fully transferring responsibility for IDEA would require an act of Congress — a significant undertaking given that at least 60 votes are needed to break a Senate filibuster and Republicans hold just 53 seats.