[wahern]

> teachers are overworked to squeeze out performance for the 90%, and cases like hers are the ones that fall through the cracks.

Hartford public schools spends about ~30% of its budget on the ~15% of special education students; basically 2x more money per student than non-special ed students. Nominally that's actually one of the highest percentages on special education in the nation, though that might have to do with how they've structured their programs.

For a variety of reasons, special education is a money pit. Your returns on investment quickly diminish, yet its easy to drum up outrage when programs fall short. Just like in medicine, specialists cost way more than regular staff, yet you need a lower ratio of students to specialists. The economics are brutal. And there are federal requirements regarding mandatory funding of special education, so parents and education lobbyists manipulate the system to get their student or preferred program under the special ed umbrella so school districts are forced to prioritize funding, removing funding from regular education programs. Over the past couple of decades special education has eaten up the lion's share of increases in K-12 public education spending in many states (especially left leaning ones like Connecticut, California, New York, etc).

Finding the right balance is really hard. You can easily find yourself in a situation like SF wrt homeless and addicted, where you can spend insane amounts of money per person yet barely move the needle.

[rendaw]

There's a huge gap between hiring specialists and not caring at all, and this sounds more like the latter:

> They would just either tell me to stay in a corner and sleep or just draw pictures, flowers for them

It doesn't take a specialist to recognize something's off (the fundamental assumption is that, barring a diagnosed learning disability, everyone is able to learn to read and write), and you don't need a full time specialist to do a one-off diagnosis. Whether they had the budget for continued full-time support after that (ex: preparing accessible teaching materials) is a separate question.

TFA is light on details, but it's hard to imagine everyone was doing the best with what they had here.

[citadel_melon]

I think we need more competent school psychologists. The field is niche and many who work in the profession don’t fully understand the platonic idea of their job.

Making the profession better paid and more well respected — both more respected for its societal necessity and the job’s rigor exceeding most other psychological/educational professions — would make the field less niche, more competitive, and more attractive to bright students choosing a career. I think school psychologists should be paid as well — if not better — than school principals. Problems like the one this article describes would be a lot less frequent if we make school psychology a more attractive profession.