Glitch sparks concerns about fully funding new grant programs for kids with disabilities

AUSTIN - State lawmakers agreed to spend $40 million on school district programs for children with dyslexia and autism, but the Legislature botched the fine print in drafting the final version of the bill, and special education advocates worry the result could cut that check in half.

After lawmakers spent much of the last year working to address shortcomings in the state's special education system, the governor Wednesday signed a bill to give $20 million in grants to prop up model programs for students with autism and $20 million in grants for students with dyslexia. But the wording in the bill could be construed in such a way that only $10 million would be distributed for programs focusing on each disability, potentially shrinking the program that advocates say is already too small.

"It may only reach half the students that we originally envisioned," said Steven Aleman, policy specialist with Disability Rights Texas, an advocacy group.

The law bars the state from issuing grants for the two parallel programs until the 2018-19 school year and are limited to $10 million in grants a year for each.

But here's the problem: the final wording of the law restricts the funding to the 2018-19 biennium, meaning the law only allows grant spending in the second year before the rest of the funding disappears.

"We're working it out," said Lauren Callahan, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, which is in charge of carrying out the law and acknowledged the legal conundrum. "It is our intention to spend the $20 million on dyslexia and the $20 million on autism. That is our intention."

Whether and how the TEA will work around the particulars of the law are unknown. The agency has the better part of a year to write rules outlining how the grant program will work before it commences.

The bill was the last to pass in this summer's special session, in which Gov. Greg Abbott challenged the Legislature to approve bills on 20 of his priority issues in 30 days. The to-do list consisted mostly of red meat Republican primary issues like curtailing health insurance coverage for abortions to passing a bathroom bill restricting which restrooms transgender people can use. Several other issues involved education, like addressing school funding and allowing special needs students to attend private schools using public dollars.

For more than a decade, Texas denied tens of thousands of students from special needs services. A 2016 Houston Chronicle investigation found the state set an arbitrary limit on the number of students who could receive special education services, setting the cap at 8.5 percent, far below the near national average of 13 percent.

Texas' special education enrollment rate plummeted to the worst in the country, spurring an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education, which is expected to publish a report of its findings by September.

The Senate tried to capitalize on the plight of families who have children struggling to get special education services in their schools during the regular session by narrowing its attempt to pass a school voucher program to students with special needs. That proposal failed to gain traction in the regular session and the special session, which ended this week.

House Public Education Chairman Dan Huberty, who has a son with dyslexia, instead offered a slate of reforms to the state's school funding formula. Among other changes, he proposed creating a new weight in the formula used to divvy out almost $650 in state funding for each student with dyslexia.

The Republican from Humble also proposed a five-year autism grant program to invest in and learn from campuses that specialize in teaching students with autism in order to identify and replicate best practices across the state.

In the 2015-16 school year, about 141,000 Texas public school students were identified as dyslexic and more than 47,500 students as autistic.

The Senate added Huberty's autism program to a paired down school finance bill late at night on the second to last day of the special legislative session after what had become months of negotiations which had turned into a stalemate. Led By Senate Education Committee Chairman Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, the chamber created a two-year autism grant program and an identical dyslexia grant program in seeking a compromise.

The late changes then had to be written into the legislation, and that's where the problem arose. Language cutting the program from five years to two years without changing other details in the bill created much of the conundrum, limiting the state spending to the last year of the 2018-19 biennium.

Coupled with several other major education issues -- such as addressing benefits for retiring teachers and bailing out small schools losing money from the expiration of an antiquated tax break program and unable to break the stalemate -- the House reluctantly agreed to the Senate's version the next day, and adjourned minutes later, essentially ending the special session.

Calls to Huberty and Taylor were not returned Thursday.

Rep. Diego Bernal, a San Antonio Democrat and vice chair of the Public Education Committee, was frustrated both with the error in the bill and the Senate's decision to change the direction of it.

"The dyslexia weight was supposed to get to every student in the state and not only did the Senate refuse to add it into the system, into the formula, but it looks like they also made it so only a very few students benefit from it. That wasn't the intent at all."