Parents, advocates eye increased special education funds with both hope and skepticism

Melissa Staggs still has a lot of questions about what her son AJ’s first few weeks of school will look like. Last year, as the two of them slogged through months of attempting lessons and therapies over a computer screen, she felt like she watched him miss out on a year of his life, not just his education.

AJ, 7, thrives in the classroom with his peers — but a Zoom version of that environment did not translate well, his mother said.

He has intellectual and physical disabilities linked to his diagnosis of Cornelia de Lange syndrome and is nonverbal. Melissa cut back on her work hours throughout the year to help AJ log into his Zoom lessons and keep him in his chair while his teacher, speech pathologist and occupational therapist tried to engage him from the other side of the screen.

"It wasn’t just his school that got shut down,“ Melissa said. ”His life was.“

While planning for the next academic year, educators and legislators acknowledge that AJ and thousands of his peers in both special and general education have a lot of time to make up for. With that in mind, the California Legislature recently approved a huge influx of funding for special education, presenting an opportunity for schools to confront head-on the academic, behavioral and social emotional losses experienced over the past year.

In Sonoma County, where students with disabilities experienced briefer opportunities last year for in-person learning compared to other Bay Area counties, teachers and parents expressed both hope and doubt that the new money will translate to effective support in the classroom.

“I’m excited, but I’m also skeptical about how it’s going to be used,” Melissa Staggs said.

Adam Stein, director of Sonoma County’s special education local plan area, which has a state-mandated oversight and advisory role as school districts craft their strategies to use the new funding, says the state’s $656 million investment is unprecedented.

“I’ve been in this business for 36 years and I’ve never seen so much,” he said.

By-district breakdowns are not yet available, but Stein provided county-wide funding estimates for a few of the new revenues.

Sonoma County districts will likely receive about $6.7 million to be used for alternative dispute resolution and learning recovery linked to COVID-19-related closures.

Broken down, that translates to $5.5 million aimed at helping students recuperate academically, behaviorally and otherwise, and another $1.2 million to support school districts’ efforts to resolve parents’ complaints or concerns when the interventions are not working.

Recovering from the past year will likely involve a variety of strategies, said Steve Mizera, executive director of special education for Santa Rosa City Schools.

For one thing, he expects an influx of requests for assessments at the beginning of the year. Many families will likely want to establish where and to what extent their children experienced regression or fell behind last year, and to begin to chart a path forward.

Santa Rosa schools will also prioritize training both special education and general education teachers to deal with an expected increase in disruptive behaviors after students’ long separation from the classroom environment. They’ll also be trained in strategies to support kids dealing with trauma related to the pandemic.

“We’ll have kindergartners and first-graders who have never been in a classroom before,” Mizera said. “We’re going to be very cognizant and training them just to get through the routines of being in school, being in front of everybody and wearing masks.”

A school district plan to increase the ranks of site-based therapists in its middle and high schools will also aid in the effort to support students’ emotional and mental health.

Rebekah Rocha, who through the end of June 2020 was principal of Cesar Chavez Language Academy, said hiring of support staff is a key step. But she fears that some districts might not want to base new hires on one-time funding like what is coming from the state this year, and the federal government in the form of COVID relief funds, though that money does not have to be spent by the end of next year.

“What is going to help students the most is extra services in the way of personnel,” she said. “If we can’t do that, I don’t know how much the money is going to help.”

Stein harbors other practical concerns: The country is dealing with a teacher shortage, for one. Students in need of extra support may not want to sign up for an extended school day to receive it. Some campuses do not have much available space for students to meet in small groups with a specialist.

Rocha, whose daughter Gigi receives special education in the Windsor School District, was one of many parents of students with disabilities who called out the slow response by local schools to offer limited in-person instruction and support to higher-needs students, which state guidance allowed as early as last fall. Few Sonoma County schools offered those opportunities before early 2021.

Part of the process to identify students’ needs in the new school year, she said, is recognizing the extent to which they were denied access to the support they needed last year, and then committing to providing compensatory services to alleviate the losses.

“I feel like as a parent, I’m still holding onto the harm that was done to students. I don’t feel like it was acknowledged,” Rocha said. “That’s the first step to repairing harm.”

Another $5.7 million for special education will also be available to Sonoma County schools after the Legislature authorized an increase in the base per-pupil funding rate, Stein said. Those funds are not targeted to specifically address COVID learning loss, but could help chip away at the extent to which school districts dip into their general funds this year to cover special education costs.

“Reducing that will be extremely helpful to all of our districts,” Stein said.

The amount, though, is unlikely to make a sizable impact on any one district’s budget in a single year. Santa Rosa City Schools, for example, pulls about $20 million annually for special education out of the general fund, Mizera said.

“If we’re finally beginning to fund special education as much as it should be, that’s a great start,” he said. But, “I want that to continue.”

No funding estimate for Sonoma County was yet available for another special education initiative, an early learning grant aimed at identifying disabilities in children from birth to age five.

For now, Stein and his staff are waiting for additional guidance from the California Department of Education on how to direct the pandemic-related funds in the coming year. But while they do, they’re also getting ready to help their local school districts and charter schools with their plans, so they will be prepared for their students’ arrivals on campus in August.

“If we learned anything in the last year, it’s that you have to be able to turn on a dime and be ready,” Stein said. in the next month, he said, “we’re probably dropping everything in favor of helping everybody with these plans.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kaylee Tornay at 707-521-5250 or kaylee.tornay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ka_tornay.