During the 2012-13 school year, 6.4 million public school students ages 3-21 across the country were identified as needing special education or related services, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
In 10 years, that increased 17.2% to 7.5 million.
In the Poughkeepsie City School District, the number of students with exceptionalities grew by 16.6%, 109 students, from October 2023 to October 2024.
As the number of students qualifying for services rises, fiscal, staffing and programmatic challenges are making it increasingly difficult for school districts across the country to keep pace with the growing population and needs of these students.
In Poughkeepsie, this has led to challenges with staffing and identifying adequate instructional spaces to create new classes. It’s also added complexity to the district’s ongoing efforts to increase graduation rates.
In response, PCSD will be undergoing a comprehensive evaluation of how best to address the needs of its student population, with changes already underway, and the Board of Education has created a committee to address these issues.
The students included in these numbers do not all require special education instruction. Some can be helped by individual speech therapy, specialized reading lessons, classroom aides or other related services.
As of last month, 766 Poughkeepsie students were receiving special education services throughout all schools. Of the district’s pre-K to fifth grade students, 22.42% receive services, compared to 15.47% a year ago. For grades 6-12, 38.2% of students receive services, compared to 33.92% last October.
For the 2023 school year, 40% of Poughkeepsie students with exceptionalities graduated in four years. This number has fluctuated over the past decade from as low as 27% to as high as 49% in 2022. Those percentages increase when allowing for more time than four years to complete graduation requirements.
What Poughkeepsie is doing
This past July, district leadership met with representatives from the New York State Education Department to discuss the district's efforts to address the evolving and varying needs of students with exceptionalities. While it was noted that positive change is evident, there is still a great deal of growth needed to erase close to two decades of underperformance.
At this meeting, district leadership committed to taking bold and aggressive steps to improve upon its efforts. Since then, the district has eliminated the assistant superintendent of administrative services role in exchange for an assistant superintendent of student support services and family and community engagement, and is seeking a firm to evaluate the district's Office of Students with Exceptionalities operations to determine if the department's structures, programming and staffing are adequate in addressing the needs of that population.
Recognizing the importance of the Office of Students with Exceptionalities, the Board of Education established a special committee that focuses on this population. The committee meetings happen twice a month and are open to the public; a schedule is available on the Board’s Committees webpage.
A need to comprehensively understand how and to what extent the design, structure and established processes meet the needs of students with exceptionalities is paramount in improving student outcomes.
Recently, the district released a Request for Proposal, or RFP, seeking a qualified firm to comprehensively evaluate the district's students with exceptionalities programming. More specifically, the district is interested in learning about the effectiveness of the programming, including but not limited to the quality of the Individualized Education Programs, the fidelity of IEP implementation, program continuum of services, referral and evaluation processes, use of evidence‐based instructional practices, professional learning, the adequacy of human capital resources, and the ability and effectiveness of engaging with stakeholders. The City School District of New Rochelle recently completed a similar review, available online.
The Poughkeepsie district expects the comprehensive evaluation to provide recommendations addressing systems, structures, processes, practices, and accountability that are action‐oriented and grounded in research to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the district's students with exceptionalities programming and services.
Responses to the RFP will need to be submitted no later than Nov. 22 at 11 a.m. Access to the RFP can be found here.
An updated presentation of the district's programming for students with exceptionalities to the community and Board of Education will occur at the Dec. 18 board Workshop Meeting.
