New Special Ed Task Force Proposed to Study Cost and Program Effectiveness and

NJ Senators Jennifer Beck and Teresa Ruiz are filing a bill that creates a task force to study the state’s problems in providing special education services to NJ’s 215,000 kids who meet eligibility requirements. From Bill S 600:

 Despite the ever-increasing allocation of State and local dollars to fund special education services each year, many public schools in the State are ill-equipped to provide effective special education and related services for their students within the district and must send students to out-of-district public schools or private schools in order to meet their needs, which increases the overall cost of providing special education and creates additional hardships for the students and their parents.

 A series of recent newspaper articles alleged that millions of dollars are squandered on special education programs each year due to fraud, a lack of oversight, a failure to document the effectiveness of programs, the need to send students to out-of-district public or private schools, and a lack of uniform standards for educating students with certain disabilities such as autism.

 Many parents and guardians of students requiring special education feel that the programs and services do not adequately meet the needs of their children, and that the current system is too inflexible to allow for necessary programmatic changes; and It is therefore in the public interest of special education students and the parents or guardians of those students to establish a task force to study various issues related to improving service delivery and providing appropriate and cost-effective special education programs and services for public school students.