A recent federal complaint related to a chain of private special education schools has called attention to a surprising fact: Connecticut sends special education students away from their local district more than any other state.
According to a federal report released last year, 6.3 percent of Connecticut students with disabilities are educated in separate schools, the highest in the nation. This figure includes students attending private special education programs, as well as those in specialized public schools.
For advocates who believe students should be educated in integrated settings whenever possible, this level of outplacement represents a red flag.
“There’s a place for specialized programs, and some families are going to want them, and certainly kids can be successful in them,” said Sarah Eagan, the state’s child advocate. “But it can’t be like that’s the only option for kids who hit middle-school age who have autism and don’t talk.”
The issue emerged last week when the non-profit Disability Rights CT and the state’s Office of the Child Advocate filed a federal civil rights complaint against four local school districts alleging they sent special education students to a “substandard and unequal” program, known as High Road. A spokesperson for the school disputed the claims in a statement sent to CT Insider last month.
Under federal law, special education students are required to be educated in the “least restrictive environment” possible, meaning they should attend school with their non-disabled peers whenever possible. Does Connecticut’s status as the state with the highest rate of outplacement suggest districts are failing to take this requirement seriously?
“It’s hard to conclude otherwise,” Eagan said.
‘They can’t handle them’
Why does Connecticut outplace so many students?
Fran Rabinowitz, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, said most districts would love to keep more students in their local schools but simply don’t consider it possible.
“Especially today, it is incredibly difficult to find special ed teachers to teach our students in-district,” Rabinowitz said. “And sometimes it’s just a very unique child, and we can’t just educate one child.”
According to a 2021 report from Connecticut Voices for Children, special education outplacement in Connecticut rose 53 percent from 2010 to 2019, from 3,474 students to 5,325, in accordance with an increase in the number of students with diagnosed disabilities.
Eagan says Connecticut’s status relative to other states could owe to the sheer number of school systems serving a relatively small population. Tiny rural districts may have only a handful of students at a time requiring intensive special education and lack the infrastructure to educate them. Poor urban districts, meanwhile, may have plenty of students with disabilities but not enough funding (or staff) to build the necessary programs.
Eagan points to Hartford, one of the districts that sends large numbers of students to High Road programs, as an example of a cash-strapped district that seems to outplace students for lack of a better option.
“That explains Hartford’s reliance on High Road, despite what I would guess is their knowledge that it’s not a great program,” Eagan said. “We’ve brought the issue around High Road to Hartford more than once, and when there are no lawyers in the room, they don’t give us any pushback on our facts.”
Asked to respond to Eagan’s comment, a Hartford Public Schools spokesperson said the district “is committed to ensuring all students have equitable access to the resources and services they need to succeed.”
Notably, districts who send students to private special education schools must pay for tuition and transportation, which can add up to more than $100,000 a year per student. In many cases, school systems could likely save money by educating these students within their districts — if they had the services necessary to do so.
Andy Feinstein, a lawyer with the nonprofit group Special Education Equity for Kids, notes that the landmark Sheff v. O’Neill desegregation decision promoted greater school choice in the Hartford area, including for special education students. This, he said, could skew the state’s outplacement numbers to some extent.
Ultimately though, Feinstein said schools outplace students for a simple reason, particularly in a time of staff shortages: “They can’t handle them.”
A cost to students
Advocates describe High Road as an example of what can go wrong when students are outplaced to separate schools. According to a recent investigation from Disability Rights CT and the Office of the Child Advocate, High Road’s six Connecticut schools were consistently under-staffed, relied on unqualified instructors and overused physical interventions including restraint and seclusion.
Some facilities had no certified physical education, art or music teachers, and one program did not have a nurse on site, the report said.
Through a spokesperson, High Road has contested these claims, saying the investigation “does not accurately reflect the academic and behavioral supports at our schools, which follow state and federal regulations and guidelines.”
Still, advocates’ concerns extend far beyond one program. Deborah Dorfman, executive director of Disability Rights CT, has worked in multiple states across the country and seen similar dynamics everywhere, with outplaced kids often forced to travel long distances to schools that lack the full array of programs available in public schools.
“I’ve literally had families say to me they feel like their children are, ‘throwaway children’ because they feel like the districts don’t care, they just send them out,” Dorfman said, noting that Black and Latino students are typically outplaced at higher rates than white students.
Indeed, research has found special education students taught in integrated settings receive more rigorous instruction, make more progress in literacy, have more social interaction and are often taught by more qualified instructors.
“The first thing a child loses is the interaction with peers,” Eagan said. “And (non-disabled) peers lose out on that. They lose out on the value of being educated with children who are a little different from they are.”
Meanwhile, Eagan said, “the private program they’re at may not have all of the other things the public school system has,” from art programs to extra curriculars.
For those who defend outplacement, the counter-argument often comes down to alternatives. In a perfect world, Feinstein says, local school districts would have robust programs for students with severe disabilities. As long as that’s not the case, though, he says ok with kids being sent to separate schools instead.
“I would rather have them in a well-staffed private program than in a thrown-together incomplete in-school program,” Feinstein said. “And I think that, in many cases, is sort of the choice here.”
Changes on the way?
Outplacement has been a subject of discussion for Connecticut’s Special Education Task Force, which was created in 2021 to examine how students with disabilities are educated and which is expected to release an initial report in the coming months.
Rabinowitz, a task force member, suggests financial incentives for districts that provide services within their local schools instead of sending students to specialized programs.
“There are some students, obviously, that are going to be outplaced regardless,” she said. “But I think, personally and as a former superintendent, that it wonderful for students to be as close to their home as possible.”
Rabinowitz said certain districts, such as Meriden, have already confronted this issue, developing more services in their local schools so they have less need to send students elsewhere.
Similarly, Eagan sees the solution as boosting programs in public school systems, making outplacement less necessary.
“We’ve got to fix this infrastructure around special education to offer the districts strategies and opportunity to give kids what they need within the public school setting, and you only use specialized programs when those needs can’t be met,” Eagan said.
As with many subjects in public education, however, the issue of outplacement comes back to funding. At a time when school districts statewide have imposed major cuts and layoffs just to balance their budgets, they can’t easily invest in the type of sophisticated special education programs some children require.
As Dorfman sees it, Connecticut won’t be able to decrease the number of students it outplaces until they’re funded at a higher level.
“The districts, based on my experience, often don’t have the resources that they need to develop the in-district services that they need to have and that they’re actually obligated to have.” she said.
