Oregon students in special education programs are often getting taught in the right classroom situations, but they’re not graduating often enough, according to special ed report cards out Wednesday.
About 13.3 percent of Oregon students qualify for special education services under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Those 76,000 students receive support from schools as spelled out in Individual Education Plans and school districts receive additional money for such students under Oregon's state funding formula. About one-third of those students have specific learning disabilities. Others have autism, or speech or language disabilities, for instance.
The state's efforts to support special education students have been mixed over the years. A recent lawsuit in Beaverton led to schedule changes so students with special needs receive as much instructional time as other students.
The latest set of federally-mandated annual report cards show Oregon districts tend to reach benchmarks around mainstreaming students on IEPs, but they're less successful at getting those students to graduate on time, or to prepare them for success after high school.
Oregon districts are pretty good at ensuring students with special needs are in regular classrooms rather than isolated into separate spaces. More than 130 of Oregon's 197 school districts met the goal that the vast majority (72 percent or more) of students with special education plans spend at least 80 percent of the school day in a traditional classroom.
Roughly the same number of school districts met a related goal, that only a small portion (10.7 percent or less) of special needs students spend much of their day (40 percent of the time) in separate classrooms.
But just 19 of 197 districts reached the desired 75 percent graduation rate for students in special education.
West Linn-Wilsonville and Lake Oswego did it. The rest were smaller, more rural districts like Woodburn and Philomath. The state’s largest districts – Beaverton (62.1 percent), Portland (49.2 percent), and Salem-Keizer (42.9 percent) – fell well short of the grad rate goals.
Many districts also fell short on goals related to what students do after high school. Beaverton, Bend-La Pine and Eugene are among the few districts that met three goals on college enrollment, employment and training after high school.
State officials responded to the report cards cautiously, arguing the more than a dozen metrics only give a partial picture of how schools are serving students with special needs.
“This is a snapshot of special education in Oregon, but it doesn’t tell the whole story,” said Salam Noor, the state's deputy superintendent. “Teachers, administrators and staff are hard at work every day working toward our shared vision that every student has access to and benefits from a world-class, well-rounded and equitable educational system.”
Copyright 2017 Oregon Public Broadcasting
