[tuchsen]

Do ya mind me asking where you are in the country? I ask because I have a severely disabled nephew, and if I recall a few years before Covid our corner of California tried to get rid of special ed in elementary school. It went about as well as its going for your kid. My nephew literally couldn't integrate with the rest of the class, he's got severe epilepsy, even if he could understand the material, he couldn't actually write because his hands shake horribly! It was actually insane to put him in a normal class, the only thing he could do was disrupt it. It was bad for everyone involved.

Fortunately though, they had kept special ed programs at other schools nearby and he got transferred pretty quickly for being a severe case. It was my understanding that our school district backpedaled and reinstated special ed, but maybe that's not the case? I thought that it was just a crazy liberal California thing, but is this cancelling of special ed a more widespread phenomena? Why the hell is that happening?

[alephnerd]

Not OP but if you're in the Bay Area a lot of that was because sales tax revenue collapsed during COVID.

School district budgets are heavily dependent on local taxes, which in turn are heavily dependent on sales tax.

Some districts have larger pockets than others due to a diverse tax base and thus were able to keep paying for those services in each school (eg. Palo Alto, Cupertino, MTV, the Tri-Valley districts) but others didn't have as deep pockets and as such had to cut down on programs and merge them.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

Looks like the start of a doom loop.

> ?? > No money in jurisdiction > Cut special Ed > Education quality takes a hit for all families > Some families move, taking their tax dollars with them > No money in jurisdiction

...

[seanmcdirmid]

This is common in Seattle schools also: integrate special ed kids in normal classrooms to promote equity...and goes as well as you would expect.