Dear Friends,

March was an upside-down month in Washington.  It came in like a lamb with warm temperatures and hopes for an early spring and is leaving like a lion with fierce snow squalls and a ridiculously cold temperatures. Similarly, Congress passed a budget through September 30^th on March 10^th with a modest increase in IDEA funds and 18 days later the President submitted his 2023 budget with a sizeable increase in Department of Education funds and grants  and a large increase in IDEA funds—including doubling the IDEA Part C grants to States.  Hopefully Congress will get back to regular order, hold timely hearings and endorse the President and Secretary Cardona’s desire to fully fund IDEA.

You may have noticed that in my contributions to the OSEP monthly so far, I am very interested in data on children with disabilities.  I highlight areas where I think we as a nation need to take a deeper dive into the data as it indicates that we’re not where we need to be for our children with disabilities.  Since April is Autism Acceptance Month, I think it’s a great time to dig into some data about children with autism.  The most recent information from the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network shows that based on their samples from 11 States, 1 in 44 eight-year-old children have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis and boys are eight times more likely to have an ASD diagnosis than girls.  If you haven’t examined the updated report, I highly recommend it.  Here’s the link to the report and it generated a lot of questions for me including:

• What is the ASD identification rate in your State and school district? Are there discrepancies by gender, race or socio-economic status?  If so, do you understand the reasons for discrepancies?
• At what age are children suspected with having an ASD typically receive an evaluation? Do certain racial or ethnic groups get evaluated later?
• What percentage of children in your State and school district with ASD receive special education services?
• How many children with ASD receive early interventions services in your State? At what age do children with ASD typically begin receiving early intervention services?  Are early intervention services for infants and toddlers with ASD provided equitablyacross your State?

A data point that the ADDM did not explore was educational environments for children with ASD.  Our IDEA section 618 data shows that children with ASD, intellectual disabilities, multiple disabilities and deaf-blindness are mostly educated outside the regular education classroom and education within the regular education classroom has not appreciably changed between the 2012 and 2020 school years.  This data raises more questions and leads me to believe that we’re stuck in traditional service delivery models based on disability categories instead of ensuring a child is educated in the least restrictive environment.  If you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out the resources on supporting inclusive education for students with significant cognitive disabilities on the TIES Center website.  I really appreciate their understanding of how busy educators are and provide very impactful strategies to support inclusive education.

In solidarity,

Valerie