Minnesota panel urges lawmakers to scrap special education cuts as more students need services
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A report from a state commission is urging Minnesota lawmakers to repeal planned special education funding cuts as the number of students receiving services continues to rise.
“Special education is already underfunded and has historically been underfunded … so that makes those cuts, I think, particularly painful and concerning,” said Laura Jean, policy coordinator for the PACER Center, a nonprofit special education advocacy group.
State leaders have been sounding the alarm about rising special education costs in Minnesota for several years.
In 2024, officials warned that rising special education costs were weighing heavily on the state budget and were expected to increase by nearly $2 billion by the end of the decade. Lawmakers grew alarmed and last year ordered the Blue Ribbon Commission on Special Education to examine the costs and recommend $250 million in cuts every two-year budget cycle.
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Now, after months of meetings, members of that commission have issued a report unanimously recommending lawmakers not enact reductions.
St. Paul Superintendent Stacie Stanley served on the commission and wrote a letter to emphasize her concerns with making reductions.
“This level of rapid cost reduction will harm the students who can least afford to be harmed,” Stanley wrote.
More students need support
The number of students who qualify for special education services in Minnesota has increased by more than 30,000 since 2017.
Those who work in special education have speculated the numbers have ballooned because more parents are getting their children evaluated for disabilities and because clinic screenings have improved.
“The tools that we have to diagnose autism have gotten better over time,” said Maren Christiansen Hofer, executive director of the Multicultural Autism Action Network. “We’re broadening our benchmark tools … to include diverse populations where those groups were not included in the past, so it stands to reason that we would be … meeting the criteria for a … diagnosis with a larger pool of people.”
But Christiansen Hofer also believes the pandemic created another wave of learning struggles.
“I think a lot about the children who missed so much school, so much access to education, so much access to social opportunities as a result of COVID, and, you know, what kind of impact that’s having on the long term,” Christiansen Hofer added.
Dan Armagost, executive director of the Southern Minnesota Education Consortium, believes a wider ability to recognize disabilities and a desire to get students the help they need have also contributed to the rise in numbers of students qualifying for special education services.
“It’s positive because we know that there’s more awareness, and we know that students are getting what they need,” Armagost said.
But the increase in services has pushed costs beyond the special education funding available from state and federal sources. The gap between special education costs and revenue — commonly referred to as the special education cross-subsidy — was $514 million in 2025 and is expected to grow to $517 million by 2029. And that’s despite steps state lawmakers took in 2023 to reduce the cross-subsidy.
Commission members found no avenues to reduce special education costs in a way that would avoid harm to students, families and schools, but they did find costs that were linked to the special education formula that could be separated.
“There were some things that were on the special ed formula that were not special education expenses. These artificially inflated the cost of special ed and, I felt, put a target on us as a whole,” said Armagost, the House Republicans’ appointee to the commission.
Aid to charter schools, certain non-special education transportation funding, and in-school interventions meant to reduce special education referrals are all linked to the special education formula in ways the commission found to be unnecessary. But while the commission recommended delinking the costs from special education, they did not recommend defunding the initiatives altogether.
“This was one the group really had a lot of struggle with because … we’re in a rock and a hard place of recommending cutting kids who have unmet needs … or at-risk against kids with special education,” Jean from PACER said. “It’s taking from one group or the other.”
“We didn’t necessarily think that those services should be cut,” Jean added. “These services do need to be there, but they’re not true special education costs, and so having them in this budget doesn’t make sense.”
In addition to unhooking non-special education services from the formula, the commission also made longer-term recommendations to improve training and retention of special education staff and reduce paperwork.
Impacts on students
Sen. Bonnie Westlin, DFL-Plymouth, served on the commission and worked with several team members to comb through Minnesota’s complicated funding formula in order to find ways to make the system more efficient. She is planning to introduce legislation next session to implement the commission’s unanimous recommendation that cuts not be made to special education.
“It’s a fiction for anyone to think that you can make this big of a cut and not have it harm students in one way or another,” Westlin said.
She’s hopeful that, with new control of Congress, there might also be changes to the federal funding Minnesota receives. The federal government is supposed to fund 42 percent of the state’s required special education services. But currently, it only funds approximately 8 percent of costs.
“It’s frustrating to me that this problem has been put on not only Minnesota, but I imagine every state to try to make up for funding that the federal government promised to provide,” Westlin said.
Rep. Kimberly Hicks, DFL-Rochester, who also served on the committee, said she plans to support efforts this upcoming session to avoid making cuts to special education.
“There is not a scenario where you cut funding from our students with the most significant needs and that ends well,” Hicks said.
More inclusive schools
While all Blue Ribbon Commission members agreed on the recommendation to avoid funding cuts, some who attended commission meetings were concerned members did not go far enough in their considerations.
Christiansen Hofer believes the commission should have spent more time discussing ways to include students with disabilities — especially students of color who have disabilities.
“Districts can actually save money by being really thoughtful about doing inclusion well,” Christiansen Hofer said.
“There are many different settings for students with disabilities, depending on the amount of time they spend with their non-disabled peers and sometimes that looks like a pullout for an OT or speech service ... but sometimes it means a completely separate classroom where there really isn’t a lot of interaction between students with disabilities and students without. And sometimes, it means a completely separate school building … how much is it costing us?” Christiansen Hofer added.
Jean from PACER agreed. She worried that special education is sometimes a “separate system within a system” that is both expensive and harmful to students. She wishes Minnesota would take time to “rethink” what its classrooms look like.
“I would love to see a rubric put in place that just helps teams identify, ‘OK, here’s how much service time a student needs, what does that look like?’” said Jean. “Not just the assumption that we’re going to pull them out for that small group or a different class, but is there a way to do that in that general classroom?”
Christiansen Hofer believes this approach might not just save money and be more inclusive — it might make schools a better place for everyone.
“Starting from a place of accessibility … when we do make those changes, oftentimes it makes things much more accessible for everybody, whether they identify as a person with a disability or not,” Christiansen Hofer said.
