Anchorage Daily News

Children in wheelchairs, forever breathing with the help of ventilators, or so mentally handicapped they need full-time nurses to help them process the world around them. These are the intensive-needs students who cost the Anchorage School District the most money to educate: an estimated $75,000 a year each.

Anchorage schools have had to limit supplies, hire fewer teachers and trim programs for mainstream students in order to pay the expensive schooling bills of the city's most disabled children, said Tim Steele, Anchorage School Board president. Legislators and the governor, however, are proposing a formula of financing the state's public schools that may drastically change.

The plan would more than double state aid for the neediest kids within the next two years and nearly triple it in three years, shifting a significant portion of the financial burden away from the city, which for years has dipped into its general education budget for a growing number of severely disabled.

Everywhere in Alaska, including Anchorage, the state pays most of the costs of education. But it has been paying only about $27,000 for the intensive-needs students, leaving a significant gap to the actual costs, said Anchorage School District Superintendent Carol Comeau, who supports the new plan.

When the state put into place its funding formula for these intensive-needs kids in 1999, the contributions seemed reasonable, said Carl Rose, executive director of the Association of Alaska School Boards.

"But the costs have escalated almost exponentially," he said.

School administrators say some of the biggest price increases have been in medical equipment and new technology that enables disabled kids to communicate better.

"School districts across the state have been absorbing the costs," Rose said.

The danger to the dozens of small districts in the state is that a severely disabled student could potentially bankrupt them, he said.

DRAWN TO ANCHORAGE

Anchorage, with the largest number of students in the state, is campaigning hard to pass the plan.

Gov. Sarah Palin has proposed to the Legislature that the state increase its contribution per severely disabled student to $50,220 by 2009, and by the year 2011, it would increase it to $77,740. A legislative task force, made up of about a dozen Republicans and Democrats, has recommended similar amounts.

Under the formula, using the current number of severely disabled kids in the state's public schools -- 1,650 students -- state aid for disabled students would increase by an estimated $84 million by 2011.

In Anchorage, about 720 of the city's 50,000 public-school students are considered intensive needs. Comeau says some have come in from the Bush, drawn by the schools' extensive special education programs coupled with the city's hospitals and other medical facilities. The number has been increasing. Just in the past year, the city has enrolled 40 more such students.

EXTRA MILLIONS

"These are kids with multiple disabilities, requiring full-time aid or care, special transportation, sometimes a nurse, special accommodation in classrooms. These are kids that are educateable but have some very serious needs," said School Board President Steele, who wants to see the district get the extra millions of dollars.

In Anchorage, the intensive-needs children are integrated into mainstream schools, often with attendants by their side helping them learn from the teacher. Steele stressed that it is not the child's fault that he or she requires more help in learning, and public education's job is to teach them. By 2014, in fact, according to the federal No Child Left Behind law, the district is supposed to have the intensive-needs kids up to the same levels of proficiency as other students in the schools -- a requirement widely criticized as unrealistic.

Each child's needs vary and the costs can be vastly different. Kristi Mickelson, special education director at the Yukon Flats school district in the Interior with 265 students, said her district has three intensive-needs kids.

"With some students, what we get (the state funding) is more than enough, with others, it doesn't even scratch the surface," she said.

Part of the problem in funding intensive-needs kids, Comeau said, is the federal government, which mandates educating the disabled, has never followed through on a decades-old promise to fund 40 percent of the costs of teaching them. This year, the federal government paid about 16 percent of the district's costs, she said.

DISCUSS: Should the state increase funding to help compensate for the education costs of disabled students?

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State formula

• Base Student Allocation (BSA) -- amount state gives a district per student: $5,380

• Intensive-needs student: Five times the BSA or $26,900

• What the governor and a legislative task force recommend for intensive-needs students:

2009: Nine times BSA

2010: 11 times BSA

2011: 13 times BSA

• Gov. Sarah Palin recommends the BSA increase by $200 a year.

• The task force recommends the BSA increase by $100 a year.

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