While providing special education services to students with disabilities is a primary function for school districts, not every district has the staff, facilities, or resources in-district to appropriately serve all students and meet their needs.
When a Planning and Placement Team (PPT) determines a district is unable to provide a student with a disability the service(s) the student needs in-district, often the district will pay tuition for the student to attend a school or program outside the district that specializes in special education services. This process is commonly referred to as outplacing. Additionally, some students with disabilities attend schools of choice and the school district in which the student resides in responsible for reimbursing the choice school for the cost of providing special education services to the student. Together, these can create a complex picture of out-of-district special education costs for a school district.
For one large school district in Connecticut, continually rising out-of-district special education costs were not only causing budgetary challenges, but district leadership did not have a clear and thorough understanding of the primary drivers behind outplacements and rising out-of-district special education expenditures. Wanting to address these challenges, the district contracted our organization to produce an analysis covering the current and future trends of the district’s outplacements and out-of-district special education costs.
Harnessing our data and policy expertise, we conducted a thorough analysis for district leadership that identified the key drivers of the district’s special education out-of-district cost increases, included a look at tuition trends, and provided scenarios and projections for possible tuition increases, which were ultimately used in the district’s budget development process.
Additionally, this comprehensive analysis, which included both public and private outplacement providers, disaggregated tuition rates by primary disability and analyzed the percentage of outplaced students by primary disability compared to the percentage of the district’s total outplacement costs.
As a result of this analysis, district leadership gained a greater understanding of their out-of-district special education costs and were better positioned to make decisions about how best to serve their students with disabilities while more effectively managing costs.
