Feb 24, 2025, OPB: Hundreds of educators and parents want to eliminate Oregon’s special education funding cap. Here’s why
Oregon law restricts how much money schools can get from the state for students with disabilities. Lawmakers are considering raising the decades-old cap. A bill to eliminate the cap entirely is gaining traction.
When Emma Beiser testified at the Oregon State Capitol last week, she wasn’t alone. Her 5-year-old daughter, Hadley, sat beside her.
Beiser traveled to Salem to testify on House Bill 2953, which would remove Oregon’s cap on special education funding. She was one of hundreds of educators, parents, lawmakers and advocates who submitted testimony or packed in and around the hearing room on Monday to speak in favor of the bill before the House education committee.
Oregon school districts receive additional money through the state’s funding formula based on how many students with disabilities they serve. But the “SPED cap,” as it’s often called, limits how much they can get. It’s been around for decades but isn’t keeping pace with the need.
As a result, advocates say schools don’t have the money they need to properly serve students with disabilities without cutting into programs for other students — and it’s causing problems in the classroom.
Beiser is an elementary school teacher in Lebanon, but she testified to highlight her daughter’s experience as a student diagnosed with autism. She described Hadley as kind, fearless and incredibly bright. The young girl loves to jump in puddles and paint every surface of their house.
But because Hadley is almost entirely nonverbal, Beiser said her daughter can’t tell someone her name or her phone number.
“As a parent, there are no words to describe the fear that comes with sending your nonverbal child into the world without you,” Beiser said. “I’m trusting the adults in her life to not only keep her safe, but to help her navigate the world, to guide her through the halls of her school, to help her make friends with peers when her communication is so different from theirs, and to be her voice in a world that doesn’t always listen.” . . .
Hadley is in kindergarten this year. Despite careful planning, Beiser explained, she had a lot of problems starting out due to a lack of adults in the room.
“Hadley was eloping out of her classroom over 50 times a week, an average of 13 times a day,” Beiser said, using the term for students leaving a classroom without permission. “She even managed to leave the school building and reach the parking lot before being redirected back inside.”
The family was eventually able to get more support. Now, with an adult by her side, Hadley can more easily participate in classroom activities and class rotations with her peers. She knows all her letter names and sounds, Beiser said proudly, and can count successfully to 30.
“As a mom, I’m incredibly happy to see my daughter thriving, but as a teacher, I’m heartbroken,” she said. “Resources at her school are stretched so thin that I can see the exhaustion on the faces of her wonderful assistants.”
Beiser called on lawmakers to remove the cap so that every student has “a chance to belong, a chance to be heard and a chance to learn.”
The state currently caps its additional funding for special education when students with disabilities in a district exceed 11% of total enrollment. However, the portion of students receiving special education services statewide is nearly 15% — more than 82,000 children in the 2023-24 school year. For some districts, that number is even higher.
Oregon Department of Education data — presented to lawmakers in a separate discussion about whether to raise the cap to 15% — shows that the current cap results in around 20,000 students not receiving funding for the services they need. School districts can apply for a cap waiver, but thousands of students are still left without adequate resources.
“For years, the waiver has attempted to support districts over the cap; but in reality … it has pushed resources around, causing resource issues in new places while trying to stem issues in others,” Louis De Sitter with the Oregon Education Association shared in his testimony.
Eliminating the cap would help address a gap of $750 million per biennium in special education funding, as Morgan Allen with the Coalition of Oregon School Administrators told the House committee. As it stands now, individual districts are covering that gap themselves.
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