Texas Saved Billions Cutting Special Education. Now the Bill Comes Due
The U.S. ordered the state to remove a cap that wrongly deprived hundreds of thousands of kids. Now the question is who will pay.
Photographer: Getty Images/iStockphoto
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Texas’s 5.4 million students are returning to school amid the usual scramble for textbooks, lockers and desks. The state is also facing a huge problem of its own creation: how to find, evaluate and properly teach as many as 200,000 students wrongly denied special education or overlooked as it sought to limit spending for the nation’s fastest-growing school population.
And then there’s the question of how Texas, under orders from the U.S. government, will pay for it all.