REGIONAL—Iowa Area Education Agencies may look different, including possibly closing, after serving special education services to students since 1974.
AEAs across the state will undergo a “comprehensive review,” looking at “more closely aligning AEAs with the Department of Education,” Gov. Kim Reynolds told The N’West Iowa REVIEW in an e-mail on Monday.
“Iowa’s Area Education Agencies were created 50 years ago to address the needs of students with disabilities, but over the years, they’ve significantly expanded their scope of services beyond the core mission,” she said.
The services AEAs provide are specified toward students with special education needs as well as pre-enrollment testing for various disabilities. Iowa AEA staff currently serves nearly 3,000 children from birth through 3 years old and their families with early intervention services and nearly 72,000 students in special education.
Although the governor’s office has made no official announcement of an Iowa AEA closure, some N’West Iowa superintendents anticipated a significant change to come following this year’s Iowa Association of School Boards’ Annual Convention held Nov. 15-17 in Des Moines.
South O’Brien School District superintendent Wade Riley attended the convention with school board member Sue McCauley and board secretary Aaron Giese and discussed the event at the South O’Brien School District Board of Education meeting on Nov. 27.
“Still a lot of uncertainty in the state when it comes to the legislative session and what is going to be next on the agenda,” Riley said. “This may be just a rumor, but I’ve heard it multiple times that they’re looking at maybe cutting AEAs completely.”
Providing choice
The Students First Act became law in January, and Gov. Reynolds has since continued to push for parents’ choice in the education system. Should Iowa AEAs close, a pool of specialists would be unemployed and available for schools to hire themselves, giving control to schools of who its providers are, and ultimately control to parents of which school their child attends.
However, when schools and families cannot afford private specialists, low-income families will go from having the resources through the local AEA to no specialized resources at all.
Money from AEA cuts may not directly go to increasing local teachers’ pay either and instead toward outpaying the best specialists.
“If they’re not centrally anchored, I’m very concerned that people’s needs will be met,” Sioux Center District superintendent Gary McEldowney said of AEAs. “It could become a bidding war and I don’t think that’s healthy for students.”
The South O’Brien School District teaches less than half students enrolled in the Sioux Center School District. Both superintendents McEldowney and Riley fear it will be the small schools across Iowa that will hurt the most should AEAs lose funding.
“If they close the AEAs, all these people are going to be needing jobs. So, do you think South O’Brien is going to be able to pay what Sioux Center is going to pay? Or MOC? No. There’s no way,” Riley said. “Then we are going to be stuck getting somebody that’s maybe not as qualified as we would have liked to have hired, and that’s where those litigation issues happen. And that is concerning for me, very much so.”
The Northwest AEA serves schools throughout 10 counties including Lyon, O’Brien, Osceola and Sioux. Among the 10 counties, Northwest AEA serves almost 45,000 students and more than 5,000 teachers providing special education services, early childhood education support, media resources and testing.
There are nine AEAs across Iowa. Dan Cox, chief administrator for the Northwest AEA based in Sioux City, said AEA’s services are unique in its statewide structure while still being able to rapidly respond to local needs.
“Every day, AEA staff are working in homes and schools from Larchwood to Lansing to provide the direct and related services that students and staff need to succeed,” Cox said. “We employ experts on the ground who provide training, coaching, and support in key areas like literacy, math and behavior. As a system, the nine AEAs continue to align and improve the work we do.”
Funding reductions
Iowa AEAs have faced state funding reductions over the last 15 years.
AEA spokeswoman Cindy Yelick, administrator for the Heartland AEA based in Johnston, said funding has diminished even more rapidly more recently.
“Last year was particularly problematic because they made the decision right at the end of session,” she said. “We had already had to file our budgets with the state, and we had already let employee contracts out, and so while we were committed to the budget that we believed we were going to have, with that last-minute reduction that we saw, that really caused us to have to shift in some ways that were not planned for.”
Keeping budget cuts away from impacting students in special education has been Iowa AEA’s priority, according to Yelick, with administration continuously taking the hit first. However, Yelick said those avenues have been drained dry.
“We have over the past several years been able to make some adjustments based on one-time reserve money to help make up those budget shortfalls, but we really are at a point where services will be impacted as we move forward if we continue to sustain cuts,” Yelick said. “It’s important to understand that we really are kind of at a tipping point where we’re going to have to start impacting service to kids if we continue to sustain additional cuts.”
The budget hits Iowa AEAs have taken over the last decade do not accurately reflect the work AEAs are doing in local schools, according to McEldowney.
“AEAs have served the Sioux Center School District very well. We are provided a lot of top-notch services for our students and staff that we wouldn’t likely be able to do if we were on our own,” McEldowney said. “We are a relatively good-sized school for our area, and we have, as most schools do, a wide range of challenges and needs for our students and for our staff. The AEA has always been a strong advocate for students and readily available with a variety of options and opportunities to provide supports.”
Looking at data
One of the governor’s defenses for an Iowa AEA reassessment is how she sees state statistics lagging.
“Today, national data shows Iowa’s students with disabilities have fallen behind their peers across the country, and state data reveals significant performance gaps among these students in both low and high performing schools,” Reynolds said. “This despite Iowa AEAs spending more money per pupil than the national average.”
Both Cox and Yelick speculate that the “national data” Reynolds is referring to are this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress results. Cox and Yelick each said NAEP, also known as The Nation’s Report Card, provides an inaccurate measurement of success among students with special needs.
Instead, Yelick said to properly measure growth among students with special needs would be to look at Individualized Education Programs.
IEPs are an individualized list of goals a specialist makes alongside a student in special education. Taking into consideration that some of the goals of students with special needs will differ from the goals of neurotypical students, IEPs assess the progress of an individual through their whole K-12 education.
“It would be unfortunate to make really make broad, sweeping statements and decisions based on NAEP results, because they really don’t tell the whole story,” Yelick said. “To single out one data point, such as the NAEP, which is a single data point taken at one point in time, really does not tell the totality of the picture and when we consider students’ IEP goals, how they’re progressing on their goals, and also then just how they are succeeding in life postsecondary or after high school. I think that tells a more robust picture of how students in Iowa are doing.”
Riley, McEldowney, Cox and Yelick all said that before legislative action is taken in Des Moines, Gov. Reynolds’ office should first hear the voices of Iowa school boards and students impacted by Iowa’s AEAs; Specifically, those in rural Iowa.
“The other thing that is so important to understand is what a difference AEAs make for rural schools and rural Iowans. We are able to work with every district in the state; we are able to work with every child from the time they are born through age 21, if that’s what their learning needs,” Yelick said. “We are able to do that in a way that wouldn’t happen without a pretty systemic approach to how we work across the state and with all students. So, I just think it’s important to understand the context is different sometimes in Des Moines, in Waterloo or in Treynor, Iowa. But part of the hallmark of our service is that we are able to meet you no matter where you are and help you get the services you need.”