"The federal government is long overdue on making good on the promise it made 27 years ago to fully fund the federal share of special education costs," said Senator Collins. "Despite scant federal funding for special education, school districts are still required by law to fund special education from their annual budgets. In short, Congress has ordered school districts across the country to uphold a law, but we haven't given them the tools to do so. It is an unfunded mandate that affects every school district in America, including schools in Maine that strain under its burden."
IDEA guarantees a free and appropriate public education to students with special needs. When Congress passed IDEA in 1975 it pledged to provide states and local school districts with 40 percent of the funding needed to support this mandate. However, despite large increases in funding over the last seven years (from $3.1 billion in 1997 to $8.9 billion in 2003), federal funds for IDEA have not exceeded 18 percent. This leaves state governments and local school districts to pick up the tab for this federally mandated program, taking away funds for other local education needs.
The bill Collins has introduced would fully-fund IDEA in eight years through mandatory annual spending increases of $2 billion each year, until federal funding reaches $24.6 billion in 2011. The bill would free up local and state funds that had previously been used to meet IDEA requirements for other important education priorities. Therefore, as the federal IDEA share grows, local school districts will have increased flexibility for all their education programs.
The House of Representatives plans to take up re-authorization of IDEA this week, while the Senate will consider IDEA re-authorization later this year.