Every year, increases in spending for special education in Harvard outpace the rest of the budget, and every year, the Finance Committee, selectmen, and other residents wonder if the schools are doing everything they can to keep such spending in control. For their part, the schools insist they are trying their hardest to keep the increases in spending down, but that they have little room to maneuver, because they must obey strict state and federal laws. State regulations require that the town provide expensive services to a growing number of students, whose needs are more severe than in the past, school officials say.
—Steve Colwell,
Finance Committee
In an effort to come to grips with the whole issue, and to see if such spending increases can be slowed without doing harm to Harvard’s special education program, town officials recently convened a new special-education task force. The task force is made up of members from the Finance Committee and the Board of Selectmen; parents; and school and other town officials. “We want to help people understand the issues, to communicate with citizens, and to help us do a better job with the kids,” School Superintendent Thomas Jefferson said in a recent interview.
Task force members include Jefferson, Cindy Russo and Steve Colwell of the finance board, Selectman Bob Eubanks, school board member Will Verbits, Sue Tokay of the Special Education Parents’ Advisory Council (SEPAC), resident Keith Cheveralls, Director of Special Services Charles Horn, and Lorraine Leonard, town finance manager.
Jefferson said that he hopes the task force can look at other towns’ programs for ideas on improving Harvard’s program, as well as for cost-control ideas. “Sometimes people think its an ‘either/or’ between cost control and excellence,” which is a fallacy, he said. He pointed out that Harvard’s new inclusive preschool has saved the town money and has provided a top-notch preschool program for both special education and non–special education preschoolers. Instead of Harvard having to pay expensive out-of-district tuition for its preschoolers, it now has tuition-paying students from other towns helping offset the costs here, Jefferson said.
So far, the task force has met three times, and is “still in the get-acquainted stage,” as Colwell put it in an interview this week. He said that special-education spending for the next fiscal year will likely be the biggest single component of the school budget for the first time ever, over-taking Bromfield’s spending, which used to be the biggest item in the school budget. “We’re getting killed with SPED [increases] every year,” Colwell said.
He believes the group’s main job is to do some deeper digging into what’s driving special education spending, and to determine where the money is going, without breaching the confidentiality of individual students. “SPED has about six line items, and they’re all big numbers,” Colwell said. With the task force meeting about once a month, he said that he does not anticipate any major findings to help in the upcoming budget talks, but hopes the group can help with the budget process in future years.
One area the task force may explore is how the town deals with unexpected out-of-district tuition costs resulting from special-needs students moving into town over the summer, or from new, unanticipated placements. Currently, these expenses show up as deficits in the current fiscal year’s budget, which makes it look as if the schools are always overspending the special education budget. Other towns use other mechanisms, such as earmarking school choice funds for these increases to the planned budget, Jefferson said.
In an interview this week, SEPAC member and parent Sue Tokay said that she would like the task force to help find ways to make the budget process for special education more consistent and informative. Also, she said, she would like to see town boards find common ground and come together to advocate for more money from the state for special education. For example, one change that would help Harvard would be if the state included transportation costs under its circuit-breaker reimbursements to the town, she said.
Just having members from the different boards and representing different points of view working together on this issue will benefit the town, Tokay said. “It’s a great opportunity for people to work together, and hopefully, something good will come of it,” she said this week. Tokay said that she thinks it is important for all groups to understand the special education issues better: “At budget time, it can get acrimonious. It’s nice to have a civil conversation [at the task force meeting] and see where people are coming from.”
