Lag Time: How Policy Compliance Failures Delay Special Education Support for Boston-Area Children

Through this partnership, our Navigators have supported more than 900 families. The vast majority (88%) of these families speak a language other than English at home, and 3 in 4 referrals involve access to special education support.

While supporting families, Navigators use a secure data system to track their progress and carefully document their interactions with teachers, special education coordinators, and other district employees. Over time, our Navigators began to notice a pattern of repeated challenges facing the families they worked with—from extended delays in completing special education evaluations to information being communicated to Spanish-speaking families solely in English.

These issues amount to more than simple paperwork errors or inconveniences. They represent violations of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) and related state laws, which protect the rights of all students with disabilities and lay out specific timelines and processes for accessing special education services. Failure to comply with these regulations results in months- or even years-long delays in services for some of our most vulnerable students. And based on our observations, these failures are alarmingly common.

Lag Time: How Policy Compliance Failures Delay Special Education Services for Boston-Area Children documents the policy compliance failures that we observed while helping 312 families access critical educational and developmental support services for their children during the 2022-23 school year, and offers recommendations for how to build a system that better serves families.

Bureaucratic delays and dysfunction are common for Boston-area families seeking special education support.

• Among the 312 families who we actively supported in the first half of the 2022-23 school year, we documented 139 instances of failures to comply with federal and state civil rights law. (About 10% of families experienced more than one compliance failure.)

• Overall, 1 in 4 families we supported encountered a compliance failure while attempting to enroll in a school or access special education services for their child.

• These failures included frequent and lengthy delays in evaluating students, delays in providing key documents in the family’s primary language, and services discontinued or delayed due to staffing changes.

• While 99% of the compliance failures we observed were concentrated in 8 Boston-area school districts, there were bright spots among them, where failures occurred in only a handful of cases. There were also repeat offenders: Two school districts had a failure rate of 40% or higher—meaning nearly half of all referral families in those districts encountered a compliance failure.

These compliance failures often keep vulnerable students from accessing essential services for months.

• Lag times typically result in student service delays of 3-6 months. Families of students in need of speech therapy, autism support, and other critical school-based supports must go without them in the meantime.

• Families encounter these issues even during their first steps in the process; of 20 referral families who requested special education evaluations for their children from Aug – Oct 2022, for instance, 14 (70%) encountered compliance issues getting those evaluations and their IEP eligibility meeting completed on time. Some are still waiting for their IEP eligibility meeting, as of the publication of this report.

Families of children aged 2-4 are especially likely to encounter compliance failures, putting already vulnerable children even further behind, before they even enter kindergarten.

• Among families with preschool-aged children, more than 1 in 3 experienced lag times due to compliance-related challenges.

• More than half (57%) of all the compliance failures we documented involved children ages 2-4, and 29% involved 3-year-olds, specifically.

• We believe this is due in part to a gap in support for children transitioning from Early Intervention programs (which end at age 3) to school-based support.

In this blog post, we share more about why we wrote Lag Time and the families behind the data.

We recognize that school districts face a multitude of challenges, from staffing to funding and scheduling, that can slow the process of getting families the support they need. At the same time, school systems must do better at meeting the needs—and legal rights—of students. Such a high rate of failure is simply unacceptable.

We propose several reasonable, common-sense changes that will make it easier for school district staff to serve families efficiently and ensure their legal rights are met. A system that works better for families will benefit both students and educators, who will in turn be better equipped to meet the needs of the children in their classrooms.

To achieve this, we recommend school districts:

• Improve district special education tracking systems and staffing. Many compliance failures are rooted in a lack of staff capacity and inadequate tracking of IEP cases. Better technological systems and increases in staff capacity (and accountability) would enable school districts to process requests more efficiently.

• Communicate with families more clearly and responsively, in language they can understand. Poor communication makes an already complex and stressful process even more confusing and opaque for families. Ensuring that families who do not speak English get properly translated information and access to trained interpreters is essential.

• Support families through the transition from Early Intervention to school-based support. States and public school systems need to collaborate to address the age-3 gap in support for children who are transitioning out of Early Intervention and into early childhood education programs or school settings.

To explore more of our findings and recommendations, download and read the full report.