ccording to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s January Budget Proposal, about 15 percent of California’s TK-12 population, more than 800,000 students, were enrolled in special education in the 2024–25 school year, with disabilities ranging from mild learning disorders to severe autism or traumatic brain injuries. This represents an uptick from 2018–19, when about 13 percent of students were identified for special education services. Over that time, the number of students in special education increased by more than 70,000 students while total California school enrollment decreased by more than 380,000.

Funding has long been a challenge in providing special education services. When the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — a law that requires public schools to provide a free appropriate public education to children with disabilities throughout the nation and ensures special education and related services to those children — was enacted, Congress committed to provide up to 40 percent of the average per-pupil expenditure to pay for its expanded federal mandate. It has never come close. California’s federal share of IDEA funds equaled 8.7 percent of the total spent in 2024–25. This underfunding has had a major impact on local educational agencies’ abilities to balance annual operating budgets and maintain quality education programs and services for all children.

The state also chips in with funds dedicated to providing special education services — but again, the amount is not nearly enough to cover even half of what many districts need to fulfill legal requirements and their obligations to students.

The state allocates most special education funding through a base-rate formula, which is distributed to Special Education Local Plan Areas (SELPAs), regional consortiums of school districts and county offices of education that coordinate special education funding and services. Larger districts often serve as their own SELPA.

Funding is distributed based on total SELPA student attendance in TK–12 and a per-student base rate. To reduce complexity and eliminate any incentives in the funding formula to overidentify students for a disability, California switched in 1998 from a model that allocated funds based on services provided and placements of students with disabilities to one that allocated funds based on the overall attendance of all students.

Most SELPAs receive funding using the same base rate —$999 per student in 2025–26, up from $897 per student in 2024–25. Additionally, the Governor included in his proposal for the 2026–27 budget an increase of $509 million ongoing in Proposition 98 funds to increase special education base rates. This additional funding would allow for full equalization of special education rates across the state, meaning that all LEAs would receive the same rate per-pupil for state special education funding.

Combining federal and state funding, individual LEAs still must cover about 60 percent of special education services from their general funds, according to education law firm F3 Law.

“The increasing share of resources directed toward special education services means that a growing portion of education funding is being allocated to legally mandated and resource-intensive supports rather than discretionary academic or enrichment initiatives,” F3 Law wrote in an analysis of the Governor’s proposal. “Analysts and policymakers have noted that schools frequently spend significantly more on special education than they receive through dedicated funding streams, reinforcing the structural challenge facing the state’s budget. As a result, the growth in special education enrollment could intensify long-term budget trade-offs, especially during periods of revenue volatility or economic downturn.”

In addition to funding, special education in California faces other challenges, including implementing inclusion in the least restrictive environment, the ability of small districts to provide services with limited staff and resources, and teacher burnout.

But LEAs across the state are working toward innovative solutions to address these issues.

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District (NMUSD) knew it had an issue with inclusion of students with disabilities being educated in the least restrictive environment, as required by IDEA. The district had arrived at that conclusion through examining a multitude of measures to try to improve outcomes for students with disabilities, including assessment scores, rankings on the California School Dashboard and an annual report from the California Department of Education on indicators for special education.

Knowing they didn’t have the time and tools to address the issue on their own, district administrators reached out to the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE), the statewide agency charged with assisting LEAs in need of support. “They were thrilled because they typically go in and support districts who are in distress and are required to get help,” said Sara Jocham, Newport-Mesa USD assistant superintendent of Special Services. “They were excited about the opportunity to proactively work with the district.

“Thus began a 16-month collaboration project with CCEE, system improvement leads and NMUSD to gather input, evaluate the systems and services for students with disabilities — including an understanding of strengths and needs, root-cause analysis and data analysis — to identify and connect to resources, strengthen leadership, and discover future partnership opportunities to provide sustainability and continuous improvement,” Jocham said.

A district-state study team conducted the work by diving deep into data related to students with disabilities and the services they were receiving. CCEE also conducted stakeholder focus groups without district staff to support open and honest discussions. The district discovered that general education teachers felt they were not prepared to support many students with disabilities and felt they should be in special education classrooms. They also found that while teachers had information about the services available for students with disabilities, they were not sure of their own roles and responsibilities or how to access services. The final big takeaway was that the district had a very high ratio of one-to-one aides for students with disabilities.

Jocham explained how district administrators explored central questions like what does student belonging mean and how do they ensure belonging for all students?

“That became a mantra in the district: the mindset of: ‘All students are all our students,’” Jocham said. “We spent most of last year doing a lot of internal special education work, training our staff, making sure we cleaned up the information about the roles and responsibilities we share with school sites and how to access people. This year, we’ve really started with general education and special education professional development. All of our teachers have professional learning time and it’s an intentional opportunity for general education and special education teachers to meet together and look at student data and outcomes and next steps and planning. And we’re seeing a lot of value in our teachers all working together.”

The district focused on “increasing independence” for students who had one-to-one aides, as appropriate. Students’ individualized education program (IEP) teams evaluated what supports they would need to be able to move them into more independence. “We know that there’s always going to be students who need that level of support, but we also want to ensure that we are doing what we can to increase student independence,” Jocham said.

These approaches are yielding results. The district’s students with disabilities have seen significant test score growth, with a more than 5 percent increase this past year in English language arts (ELA) and 3.19 percent increase in math in the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress. Additionally, the district saw its students with disabilities raise two levels in ELA and one level in math on the California School Dashboard.

Board member Lisa Pearson reflected on how intentional partnerships and deep work leads to success. “Our district’s collaboration with the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence demonstrates how strong partnerships and intentional systems can lead to real results,” she said. “We’re encouraged to see measurable growth in student achievement for our students with special needs, and we remain focused on sustaining this progress through coordinated, needs-based supports.”

“If you’ve seen one SELPA, you’ve seen one SELPA,” said Gina Danner, executive director of the Mendocino County SELPA and chair of the Small and Sparse SELPA Committee of the California SELPA Association. “We use that a lot among SELPA directors. Each SELPA gets to determine how we choose to allocate our special education resources locally.

“SELPAs were created to ensure that regional structure within state law for the purposes of assuring that the provision of special education services and support was available to break down the access and barriers to services for all students within that defined region,” Danner continued.

SELPA administrative units are typically located in a regional county office and offer many services to the districts in their regions including fiscal oversight and support, technical assistance around compliance monitoring and IEP development, alternative dispute resolution when conflicts arise between districts and families, and professional development.

These SELPAs can be lifelines to small districts that do not have the staff capacity to provide all their own special education services. Danner’s SELPA represents rural Mendocino County, a large geographic region that takes about three hours to drive from end to end. The SELPA includes 11 school districts and the county office of education, and all but three are categorized as small LEAs, defined as a district with less than 100 students with disabilities.

Due to the size of the county, the Mendocino SELPA provides regional support primarily through three program specialists. “The program specialists spend a lot of time in the classroom in their various districts, observing students interacting with teachers,” Danner said. “They do a lot of coaching and modeling for staff and also meet regularly with district administration on higher-level cases.”

Professional development provided by the SELPA is also mainly regionalized and often individualized to the needs of a district. “Recognizing the challenge of limited subs available if teachers are going to be out of the classroom, we’ve shifted our practice in the professional development that we offer in that we go to them now. We tailor a lot of our professional development to specific district needs and or requests, sometimes down to the site level,” Danner explained.

Staffing is another area where SELPAs can assist struggling districts. “There is a shortage of special education teachers and related service providers across California, and it’s even harder for really remote districts to recruit and retain staff,” said Danner. “While we don’t hire teachers directly, we work very closely with our COE’s Special Education department. They employ a lot of the related service providers that are then farmed out to support those smaller districts that can’t hire their own. For example, a school district in Northern Mendocino County that has an average daily attendance of 250 kids, they’re not going to be able to employ a full-time school psychologist, nor is there a need for a full-time school psychologist. Our regional structure is such that the county office of education employs multiple school psychologists, and then they are contracted for an appropriate number of days to serve our small districts.”

One other large issue for small districts is serving students with the most extensive needs. Whereas a large district may have a nearby non-public school option that would better serve a particular student, that is often not the case in rural areas, and certainly not in the budget.

“We’ve chosen to utilize our resources in a different way, rather than paying for transportation to send students out of the county a long way to go to those specialized schools, as well as paying for that high-cost placement,” Danner said. “We’ve developed our own program, and that is the Registered Behavior Technicians, or RBT program.

“These are highly trained and certified individuals who have extensive training and background in applied behavioral analysis to really support students with those extensive needs where they’re not making it in their programs with just your typical special education paraprofessional,” she continued. “We operate that program countywide, and in doing so, we have been able to continue to support students within their local districts. Over the course of years, we’ve impacted many students so that despite their really extensive needs, they still get to go to school in their home district.”

Fremont Union High School District prides itself on ensuring that case management numbers for special education teachers are below state requirements, according to Director of Educational and Special Services Nancy Sullivan. However, she believes the increasing demand of reporting requirements is a big challenge for educators.

“I think what has happened and continues to happen is, there is the increasing demand of the compliance efforts, the increased number of pages in an IEP, the legal liabilities that teachers feel in implementing IEPs. We have sensed for several years now, and certainly coming out of COVID, this really big challenge supporting a strong instructional program while also being a strong case manager,” Sullivan said.

To help with the administrative overload, the district piloted a new district role, the IEP specialist teacher. “Depending on the enrollment at the school site, we assign a certain number of teachers for this role who would be responsible for coordinating, writing up and facilitating IEP meetings, annuals and triennials,” Sullivan explained. “And it just so happened that two sites where we piloted and were most successful, were the sites that have our largest special ed enrollment. So, this is now a contractual position. These positions are basically working on behalf of their colleagues in these IEP meetings, and the vast majority of our teachers have been tremendously supportive of this role and how it’s positively impacted their workload.”

Along with districtwide efforts to improve inclusion and implement Universal Design for Learning to support all students, Fremont Union HSD is seeing results. According to the 2025 California School Dashboard, the district’s students with disabilities improved one category in ELA and two categories in math.

“We’ve been building things over the years, and then last year we made a real concerted effort to begin very intentional planning instead of just this piecemeal professional development. It’s an ever-growing strategic plan to increase inclusion efforts and promote positive outcomes for students with disabilities through specific post-secondary indicators,” Sullivan said.