HOUSTON — For decades, Texas public schools have systematically robbed students with dyslexia of the protections that federal law entitles them to.

By the end of this school year, that will have finally changed.

Instead of providing students with dyslexia detailed special education plans, with mandatory progress checks and legal safeguards, as they would for students with other disabilities, Texas schools have instead filtered students with dyslexia into the U.S. Department of Education’s 504 program that offers fewer protections for students.

Parents say this practice resulted in Texas schools systematically failing students with dyslexia for decades.

Under a bill enacted in 2023, districts have until this summer to move students receiving special instruction for dyslexia onto full special education plans, including conducting comprehensive assessments that could catch other learning disabilities that were overlooked in the past.

The changes have been applauded as long-needed and providing important protections for students with dyslexia, however, they come at a time of extraordinary strain and upheaval for public school districts and introduce requirements that compound those struggles.

Over the past five years, the number of students with dyslexia in Texas public schools has increased by about 130,000, or 70%, as part of a broader trend of exploding special education enrollment. Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental condition that makes it difficult for people to break written words down into sounds, and it is one of 13 qualifying disabilities for special education services under federal law.

At Cleveland ISD over the past five years, the number of dyslexic students has more than doubled. As the 12,000-student, rural East Texas district is running a deficit budget this school year, Superintendent Stephen McCanless estimated that the special education department spends about 150% of its state allotment for special education, forcing them to pull funds from other areas.

“Moving it under special education, it has created more of the overhead, the operational needs, the logistical needs, the paperwork,” McCanless said. “We would have preferred, and I think most districts would have preferred, it stay as is, but we are bound to comply with the law and comply with what is handed to us, so we had no choice.”

Some of the activists who helped press for the 2023 bill, including Robbi Cooper, said it’s wrong for school districts to blame the bill for the problems they’re facing.

School districts, state associations and their lawyers “have created a false narrative that parents are unreasonable and their kids and the schools suffer the consequences of adversarial climates when students’ needs remain on the back burner,” Cooper said. “Until schools and others acknowledge their role in this shortcoming, the system will continue to be broken and a target for reform.”

‘This is a Texas issue’

When Elizabeth Wilson’s daughter, Beckley, was a kindergartner, she struggled with reading. Wilson asked her Dallas-area school district to evaluate Beckley for dyslexia.

Rather than conducting a full initial evaluation, as it would for another disability, the school conducted a more informal, narrow screening. She was not dyslexic, they determined, and she was held back academically.

The family paid $3,500 for an evaluation, which found Beckley to be “profoundly” dyslexic, Wilson said. The district offered her remedial reading services, but Beckley still struggled, feeling rushed. Teachers told her they needed to get through the scripted curriculum within two years. Wilson felt the lessons weren’t addressing Beckley’s needs.

After two years, Wilson said, Beckley’s reading level had decreased.

Wilson pulled her daughter out of the public school, placing her into a private one that quickly built a customized plan for Beckley, where she made huge strides.

“What we came to realize was this isn’t just a Highland Park, Dallas, issue, this is a Texas issue,” Wilson said. “Texas had chosen not to serve kids with dyslexia appropriately.”

Special education plans are governed by a federal law known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, including students with dyslexia. But Texas chose instead to serve those students through a process called 504 accommodations under a different federal law — one with far less stringent requirements. It also created a state handbook that prescribed how districts should identify and remediate students with dyslexia, but it lacked a mechanism for compliance.

Under federal law, students suspected of having autism would receive a comprehensive evaluation for other disabilities. When a disability is identified and an educational need is demonstrated, a committee meets to develop a written agreement to provide services for the student over a period of time with regular progress check-ins.

By contrast, 504 plans are generally designed for students with physical disabilities who need accommodations — like sitting in the front of a classroom or having a few extra minutes to work on an exam, rather than receiving pull-out lessons at school to help keep up with the learning material — and students on such plans can have services more easily altered or dismissed without parental input.

It’s unclear where the split for dyslexia between special education and 504 plans originated, but there are two prevailing theories: Some suggest it’s political, as students in special education generate extra expenses the state may not have wanted to pay, while students on 504 plans do not. Others suggest it came from parents who felt a “stigma” about their children being labeled as needing special help.

A 2018 letter from the federal Office of Special Education Programs informed the state this practice was illegal because dyslexia is a disability, like any other, part of the rationale for a $33.3 million fine paid by the state. The OSEP report stemmed from a 2016 Houston Chronicle investigation that revealed an illegal state cap on the percentage of special education students per district.

This in turn forced changes to the Texas Dyslexic Handbook, a document maintained since 1986 outlining the state’s policies on identifying and educating students with dyslexia, and eventually changes to state law.

“There’s no other disability where we have an additional state handbook on how to handle the procedures,” said Tomball ISD Director of Special Services Michael Webb. “There’s not a TEA handbook on autism or a TEA handbook on any other intellectual disability.”

Advocacy and testimony from parents like Wilson and Cooper helped pass the 2023 law ending the split, which came to be known as the Beckley Wilson Act.

They see it as a huge win for Texas families.

“You have all the rights under IDEA,” Wilson said. “The child doesn’t have to fit the program, the program has to fit the child, and your child is entitled to a lot of rights.”

But school districts have said the new requirements are burdensome, and there are some who chafe against the strict oversight exercised by the federal government.

A newly filed bill in the Legislature would take a first step toward refusing to comply with the federal IDEA standards and forfeiting certain federal funding. The bill mirrors a similar effort in Tennessee.

It would create a commission to study whether national standards impose “an unreasonable burden on implementing protections and educational initiatives for students with disabilities” and provide demonstrably better outcomes.

House Bill 2168 was filed by Rep. Terri Leo-Wilson, a Galveston Republican and former special education teacher. She declined an interview request.

$2 billion in unexpected costs, and counting

Some key differences between special education and 504 plans: Special education requires customized learning plans for each child, including strict rules for annual committee meetings with parents and a requirement to give students rigorous initial evaluations for various learning disabilities. Because multiple disabilities can exist in tandem, all students suspected of having a qualifying disability receive these screenings.

The right to these initial evaluations was an important factor for activists, but getting them done is now also the biggest challenge facing schools.

Under Texas’ school finance system, districts are not reimbursed for the expenses of completing these evaluations, which can cost $1,000 to $5,000. They are time and paperwork-intensive, sometimes taking up a full day from staff, drawing them away from classrooms.

Costs for evaluations are a large contributor to the nearly $2 billion gap in state funding for special education. School districts have struggled to find or pay staff to keep up; caseloads have climbed, burning out staff and forcing schools to increasingly turn to expensive contracting firms, adding to the vicious cycle.

The Beckley-Wilson Act also called for staff members on special education teams to have specific dyslexia training.

“This creates a real tension between wanting to have the most qualified person actually providing the intervention and the services for the child with dyslexia, and then also now requiring that they’re sitting in (special education) committee meetings and taking them away from that,” said Andrea Chevalier, director of governmental relations for the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education.

A lot of the parental criticism from schools is related to the availability of school staff, Chevalier said, something often outside of the control of schools in the midst of a nationwide teacher shortage.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, we’re supposed to find people just out of thin air?” she said.

The Beckley-Wilson Act was passed overwhelmingly in each chamber with bipartisan support in part because the nonpartisan Legislative Budget Board projected that it would have “no significant” financial impact.

However, in an email sent to the TCASE and shared with Hearst Newspapers, the Texas Education Agency acknowledged that there was a “significant” increase in special education costs and the number of staff required from projections, “largely related to the shift of dyslexia students from 504 to SPED.”

Laura Garza, special education director at a co-op that works with 10 small districts and charter schools in the San Antonio area, said the changes are “a good thing” and “where we should have been all along.”

But the lack of state resources to implement these changes creates its own obstacles, she said.

“It’s just the process and the money and the stipulations of the training requirements and the teacher certifications, the requirements of that and getting everybody converted over and approved to be able to even provide the service has been a struggle,” she said. “You know these programs are not cheap, getting people trained to implement these programs is not cheap, so it further drains our budgets.”

In Tomball ISD, a more than 20,000-student district in the northwest suburbs of Houston, the dyslexic population more than tripled from 350 in 2019 to about 1,300 this school year.

“It definitely has had a great effect when it comes to the funding,” said Keri Williams, the district’s director of special services. “The cost of evaluations alone are pretty immense when you’re looking at the amount of personnel that it takes.”

The district — which faced an overall deficit of $9.1 million last year — has been forced to draw from its local funds to pay for special education.

“We’re just trying to find ways to make ends meet,” Webb said, including huge caseloads for staff, overtime, expensive outside contractors and even partnering with graduate student interns to help out.

State funds mired in voucher politics

Right now Texas special education is at a pinch point: additional funding did not pass in 2023 after it became a pawn in the debate over private school vouchers, so school districts have been forced to scrape by, with many running deficit budgets or even closing campuses as a result.

The shift from 504 to special education has been more costly than expected, Wilson said, but she believes it remains a good thing for students.

“I would say special education at-large is underfunded, and we are now part of that conversation now that we are rightly part of special education,” she said. “This is where our dyslexic children should have been served for decades, but turning that ship and going through that transition, there’s always going to be bumps.”

A collection of reforms written by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and policy experts dating back to 2020 would address some of these bumps, including funds to offset the cost of initial evaluations. Although they did not pass last session, also held hostage in school voucher politicking, they have been filed as a fresh bill in this year’s Legislature.

Wilson, Cooper and other activists who pressed for the 2023 bill are now throwing their weight behind efforts to increase special education funds in the capitol.

In the long run, Wilson argued, it will be far more cost-effective for the state to properly teach kids with dyslexia. Struggles with early reading are correlated to academic struggles throughout high school, she said, which can in turn lead to mental health struggles or even increased crime rates.

Research has also shown that dyslexia rates among incarcerated people are more than twice as high as in the general population.

“Change is never going to be perfectly smooth, but you have to do the right thing,” she said. “We couldn’t continue to break the law.”

‘Hard-fought’ rights

Several factors play into the increase in students with dyslexia.

In recent years, Texas schools have been required to search harder for students with disabilities of any kind, parents have proactively requested special education evaluations far more frequently, and the Legislature now requires each district to screen its kindergarteners and first graders for dyslexia.

Once students are identified with dyslexia, they typically receive extra phonics-intensive reading lessons. These lessons are frequently described as teaching students to break a “code” preventing them from reading, literally rewiring their brains over time. This “specially designed instruction” is what triggers the requirement for students to operate within special education departments.

The goal for most dyslexic students is to help them overcome their challenges so they no longer need the extra classes. In those cases, they may need a little extra time on tests or other accommodations, which can still be handled on through a 504 plan.

Cooper, the activist, has dyslexia and so does her husband. Their son was articulate from a young age, but he struggled with reading. Her local school district suspected he had dyslexia and pushed to serve him through a 504 plan.

“A lot of families even that we knew, they didn’t want the stigma, they didn’t want their kid in special ed, and a lot of times they weren’t being offered,” she said. “But we kind of pushed for it.”

Despite frequent clashes with her school and the district, Cooper said, her son was able to get the help he needed to learn to read. Now 23, he recently graduated with his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. Cooper has become a policy advocate who helped push Texas to reform its dyslexia policies.

“We’re talking about literally life-changing interventions from a kid who might go through school not reading at all, kind of getting the minimum, feeling like an idiot and having mental health problems, not living up to their potential, not participating in society the way they could have participated because of not getting what they needed, to a system that is set up — maybe not executed that way — but is set up to make sure the students’ needs are met,” Cooper said.

“That’s not something to be taken lightly. That was a right that was hard fought for.”

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