The number of children under 5 years old referred for special education evaluation has increased substantially in Western New York, but traditional resources to help children with disabilities have not kept pace.
Erie County Department of Health officials have charted a rise over the past decade of referrals for potential disabilities or developmental delays in children 5 years old and younger. Ten years ago, it was about 3,500 referrals annually. It is between 4,500 and 5,000 now, the county said.
Mary Martin, who directs Early Intervention Services for the county’s Department of Health, described the increase as “not an alarmingly higher rate,” but she said it is a prominent issue that has been discussed for years at state-level task force meetings.
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Students with severe disabilities are growing in number in Erie County and Buffalo Schools, which is expected to prove a challenge within an environment hard-pressed to accommodate them.
For Buffalo Public Schools’ special education department, however, a sharp increase in preschool students with disabilities has administrators scrambling for solutions that staffing-starved agencies can no longer satisfy.
“It’s hard to keep up,” Kim Hoelscher, Buffalo Schools’ assistant superintendent for special education, said in a spring interview.
Comparing annual data published by the district, Buffalo Schools for the 2023-24 school year reported 1,858 preschool students with a disability, an increase of 284 from the year prior. The Committee on Preschool Special Education (CPSE) completed 1,166 initial evaluations of referred students ages 3-5, the most in a six-year span.
With the need for special education services rising – and data showing early intervention is immensely helpful for preschool students with disabilities – Buffalo Public Schools preschool offerings for students with disabilities have soared.
One strategy Buffalo Schools has deployed to accommodate the influx of students is by opening its own self-contained prekindergarten special education classrooms. The district operated 11 last year, Hoelscher said, and has applied to the state to open 15 classrooms this year. These typically have eight students, one teacher and either two or three paraprofessionals.
“We’re losing agencies, we’re gaining kids – we’re really trying to help pick up the need for the classrooms,” said Margie Loomis, Buffalo Schools’ supervisor of special education for CPSE.
Buffalo’s budget projects $7.8 million in state funds to run these classrooms in 2024-25, an increase from $4 million last year. Additionally, the district expects special education itinerant teachers (SEIT) to help transition students with special needs into general prekindergarten classrooms, which could also benefit from push-in, pull-out approaches.
The mission, as federal law demands, is to ensure students with disabilities learn in their least-restrictive environment.
Even with CPSE bumping its meeting metrics and applying for more classrooms, Maelena Fisher, chair of the Special Education Parent Advisory Committee, through her discussions with parents believes there’s a “huge backlog” of children waiting for evaluation. “There’s students who requested evaluations four months ago that are still waiting,” Fisher said Friday.
Evidence of higher needs
Not only are more students showing developmental delays and receiving disability diagnoses, but their degree of need is higher, too.
“It started out, it was speech and communication delays, now it’s children who are more involved,” Loomis said, referring to global development delays in which students may be slow to reach milestones in several areas, such as both speech and fine motor skills.
Several parents of students with autism are angry by changes Buffalo Public Schools implemented in July and August to address special education class size and structure for the 2023-24 school year.
Hoelscher said Buffalo’s special education office has recently seen more behavioral issues and students with autism; the two are not mutually exclusive. A disability diagnosis can be challenging because behaviors can be a manifestation of several disabilities, not only “emotional disability.”
Sensory issues have increased over the last decade, Loomis continued, which makes occupational therapy critical for development. “If children come into a classroom and are expected to attend to a task or sit for an extended period of time, they have a greater difficulty with that,” she said.
Why are individual needs more intense? There is not one reason.
“There are probably a million sociological reasons for increased needs,” Martin said.
So, what can parents do?
How the system works
Determining eligibility, establishing an education plan and providing resources for students with a disability are among the most overwhelming tasks for parents. For children under 3 in Buffalo, the pathway often begins at the doctor’s office, rolls through Erie County and its partner agencies and flows into Buffalo Public Schools.
Martin, Erie County’s division director for early intervention, said in May that parents, pediatricians or nursery schools identify a developmental delay or disorder and then submit a referral to the county, which sets the process in motion. A service coordinator then visits the child's family and coordinates an evaluation. If the child is deemed eligible for the program, a plan is designed and appropriate services are offered, primarily through the county’s agency partners. The child’s progress is reviewed, and an annual evaluation is completed.
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From ages 3-5, the child transitions to CPSE, which is led by a school district chairperson and usually comprises the parent of the child, a special education teacher or agency representative, and a coordinator from the county. The committee may develop an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, a legal document that lays out a plan of supports and services designed for the student with the disability.
Since most of these children are not yet in kindergarten, they may receive services at a variety of locations, such as at one of the district-affiliated Head Start preschools, in a Buffalo Schools prekindergarten classroom or at a special needs specific program, such as those at The Summit Center or Buffalo Hearing & Speech Center.
“A lot of people with ADHD can do a lot of things,” said Colleen Adams, a licensed psychologist, who was also diagnosed with ADHD in high school. “They just can't do it without accommodations.”
Seven CPSE chairpersons evaluate students’ eligibility for services, review evaluations and write IEPs, Loomis said. The team has conducted more than 2,100 meetings this year, she said, and district data shows 855 annual reviews of preschool IEPs, nearly 200 above last year’s total. On-call personnel – such as speech pathologists and occupational and physical therapists – have expedited the evaluation process.
In kindergarten, they transition to oversight by the Committee on Special Education (CSE), which makes a specific classification from the 13 different disability categories. A child in CPSE are classified as a “preschool student with a disability.” Students with disabilities may make significant improvements and shed their classifications.
Agencies: Shrinking yet needed
Martin and the Buffalo Schools officials agreed that agencies – specialized service partners that employ therapists – are struggling to a point where creative alternatives are required. Tasks handled by agencies in the past – such as conducting evaluations, offering their own education settings and providing services directly to schools – are no longer a given.
“Many agencies we work with have closed classrooms, which is why we have had to open them,” said Loomis, who worked for an agency before she moved to Buffalo. Martin, from Erie County, said she is actually working with more agencies overall – but those agencies employ significantly fewer therapists.
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“People are retiring, and there’s not an influx of young people,” said Martin, who added that salaries for human service workers pale when compared to fields such as computer programming. “It’s a different world.”
She said New York is implementing recruiting tools, but wages and a low state reimbursement rate for providers do not align with the demanding work required to help high-need students. National education media continue to criticize insufficient federal funding for workers in special education. Martin admires those who persevere.
“These are people who are truly dedicated to the population and truly believe in the work,” she said.
Hoelscher understands the dilemma and calls for government to act.
“Reimbursement is not what it should be,” the assistant superintendent said. “Agencies don’t take on (special education) evaluations because they don’t provide enough money to pay that evaluator a full salary.”
In a panel on the county website, New York mentions the shortage and advertises jobs in several fields: audiologists, mental health practitioners, behavioral analysts, psychologists and social workers, to name a few.
Positives and a path forward
There is a positive angle: Higher numbers of preschool special education referrals show improved awareness for and identification of special needs.
Screening tools are working, and the general public is better informed about autism. Collaboration between Erie County, Buffalo Schools and local agencies has shown the fruits of early intervention, which research shows are intellectual, social-emotional and physical.
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“We provide supports to them at an earlier age in hopes that those supports will ween out as they get to school age,” Loomis said. “These are their foundation years. Their brains are developing, their bodies are developing – we want those skills to become second nature. We want to be able to pull back special ed services by second grade.”
Expect significant attention next school year on special education in Buffalo Schools. In a May presentation to the School Board, at-large board member Ann Rivera urged the district to carefully evaluate its existing program and demanded changes. “They are our students,” Rivera said. “They’re not something separate.”
Even though Rivera will not run for reelection, two committees on special education – one with School Board members and the other an ad hoc district group – were approved in February to produce a comprehensive review, similar to the work of the Council of the Great City Schools in 2014.
“The importance is very high in students who are preschool age because it’s the very beginning of their school journey,” she said, “and it’s going to affect everything else that comes next.”