The most common question we get from parents seeking inclusive education in California is where should I move? Is there a school district where children with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities, multiple disabilities, and autistic children, are included with their general education peers? Is there a school where my child with extensive support needs will be taught alongside kids without labels? Where can my child be accepted in the classroom that they would be taught if they didn't have an IEP (as the Federal law prescribes) - without the parents having to take out a bank loan to pay advocates and attorneys for the privilege of a free and appropriate public education?
Ed Facts is a US Department of Education initiative to collect, analyze, and promote data supplied by the state departments of education. In March of 2024, Ed Facts posted a spreadsheet for the 2022-23 school year on educational environments. Each year, every state must report the numbers of students for each Local Education Authority (LEA) in every type of educational environment as is required under the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA). This data goldmine provides a snapshot of inclusive education across the nation, district by district.
California now also reports this data locally. SB-692 Special education: pupils with disabilities: least restrictive environment passed in August 2022, adding Sections 56049 and 56049.1 to the California Education Code. School districts now have to report their LRE data disaggregated by race and by disability. Through DataQuest, you can view the data for each County, SELPA, and school, and you can also download a data file to analyze.
The first thing we did was to separate the charter schools into their own list. Many charter schools have a high degree of inclusion – indeed they often have no separate classrooms available and try to avoid a situation where they are on the hook for sending a student admitted to the charter to a separate school. We found 214 schools out of 1277 that had 100% of students spending 80% or more of their day in general education. The average percentage of students in a charter school that were included for at least 80% of their day was 87.6%, far higher than the average for all California schools. Sadly we also know that many charter schools “counsel out” students that have extensive support needs; in other words, schools will tell parents, “We would love to have your child within our inclusive environment, but we just don't have what (s)he needs here.”
Charter schools have been criticized for not taking their fair share of students with disabilities (SWD), and this can be seen in the data by looking at the percentage of children with disabilities (CWD) at each school. In the 2023-2024 school year, California has 5,837,690 students of which 799,980 have disabilities, which is almost 14 percent. This percentage has increased closer to the national average, indicating that California is doing a better job of ‘Child Find’ – their statutory responsibility to identify children who need special education services. 709,635 California students attend charter schools, and 87,641 are students with disabilities – around 8%!
A 2019 Overview of Special Education from the California Legislative Analyst’s Office found that “about 10 percent of students attending charter‑only SELPAs have IEPs, as compared to about 12 percent of students in regional and single‑district SELPAs. Further, about 2 percent of students attending charter‑only SELPAs have relatively severe disabilities (meaning any disability aside from learning disorders, speech impairments, or health problems), as compared to about 4 percent of students in regional and single‑district SELPAs.”
The good news is that in the data for 2023-24, we found that more than half of the school districts reporting were meeting the new state target (64%) for the percentage of students in regular classrooms for 80% of the day (585 out of 1009).
In the data, we found 85 California school districts that on paper have 100% of students with disabilities in a regular classroom 80% of the school day. Before you call the moving truck, nearly all of these school districts are small rural districts with one or two district schools, most just one. These are mostly “one-room school houses.”
Photo credit: https://flic.kr/p/fNtgj
Out of 85 school districts, 21 had less than 40 children, and 52 had less than 100. The biggest of these had 500 and the smallest 3. In all, 8407 kids in California got to attend these ‘perfectly inclusive’ districts, including 791 children with disabilities. That is only 9.41% and is only a slight improvement over the charter schools.
It's clear from the enrollment numbers that these schools are not providing special education to the 14% of their population that we would expect to qualify based on the state average –and there aren’t less kids with disabilities in the countryside! What's likely happening is that the kids are being enrolled in county schools. Six of the districts had less than 10% students with disabilities, suggesting that students with extensive support needs were being educated elsewhere – likely in county or regional programs. In some ways, a district with 100% LRE may be the least inclusive school district, engaging in the same “counseling out” that we see in charter schools. Many children with extensive support needs are sitting on a bus for long hours each day traveling to programs, rather than getting to know their neighbors in their local school.
In rural areas, the shortage of special education teachers can leave children without any support. Rural districts find it challenging to recruit a teacher for three or four children. Specially designed instruction might be provided by an itinerant teacher working remotely. Ironically, while families in urban areas struggle to access inclusive environments, in rural areas, presence might be easier to achieve, but with a huge vacuum of appropriate support.
On the other hand, the teachers in rural districts, often teaching several grade levels together, differentiating instruction for all students, might have the very skills needed for meaningful inclusion
We would love to hear from you if your child attends a rural school – how inclusive is your school district?
More from the data mine soon.
Public School Distrists with 100% of students with disabilities educated in the regular cassroom 80% or more of the day | ||
Alameda | Total enrollment of all students | Percentage of Students with Disabilities |
12 | 8.33% | |
268 | 5.60% | |
Butte | ||
32 | 15.63% | |
Contra Costa | ||
69 | 4.35% | |
El Dorado | ||
16 | 37.50% | |
Fresno | ||
68 | 14.71% | |
240 | 6.67% | |
Glenn | ||
71 | 11.27% | |
Humboldt | ||
3 | 66.67% | |
6 | 16.67% | |
10 | 20.00% | |
28 | 10.71% | |
67 | 13.43% | |
111 | 8.11% | |
Inyo | ||
69 | 20.29% | |
151 | 13.91% | |
Kern | ||
19 | 10.53% | |
52 | 7.69% | |
67 | 10.45% | |
69 | 5.80% | |
142 | 8.45% | |
Lassen | ||
6 | 16.67% | |
185 | 9.73% | |
243 | 11.52% | |
Madera | ||
82 | 19.51% | |
Marin | ||
9 | 33.33% | |
Mendocino | ||
27 | 11.11% | |
Merced | ||
56 | 14.29% | |
107 | 5.61% | |
Monterey | ||
36 | 8.33% | |
39 | 12.82% | |
61 | 9.84% | |
107 | 10.28% | |
127 | 8.66% | |
Napa | ||
48 | 14.58% | |
93 | 8.60% | |
Riverside | ||
25 | 16.00% | |
San Benito | ||
19 | 26.32% | |
23 | 8.70% | |
26 | 7.69% | |
43 | 4.65% | |
San Bernardino | ||
129 | 12.40% | |
San Luis Obispo | ||
50 | 16.00% | |
180 | 6.11% | |
Santa Barbara | ||
61 | 8.20% | |
151 | 9.27% | |
Santa Cruz | ||
163 | 12.88% | |
Shasta | ||
15 | 26.67% | |
40 | 7.50% | |
41 | 7.32% | |
Siskiyou | ||
5 | 20.00% | |
14 | 7.14% | |
15 | 6.67% | |
35 | 14.29% | |
38 | 18.42% | |
50 | 8.00% | |
62 | 4.84% | |
76 | 7.89% | |
115 | 10.43% | |
149 | 8.05% | |
207 | 6.28% | |
Sonoma | ||
9 | 33.33% | |
15 | 13.33% | |
111 | 19.82% | |
115 | 13.04% | |
137 | 7.30% | |
Stanislaus | ||
182 | 5.49% | |
Sutter | ||
157 | 8.92% | |
495 | 13.13% | |
Tehama | ||
39 | 12.82% | |
103 | 10.68% | |
Trinity | ||
14 | 7.14% | |
66 | 10.61% | |
72 | 9.72% | |
85 | 14.12% | |
Tulare | ||
71 | 5.63% | |
101 | 5.94% | |
141 | 7.80% | |
175 | 5.14% | |
180 | 10.56% | |
219 | 5.48% | |
282 | 5.32% | |
302 | 6.29% | |
329 | 5.47% | |
Ventura | ||
479 | 8.56% |
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