Parents of children who have special needs realize that their parenting responsibilities will not end when their child becomes eighteen. Unfortunately, the education system may not have that same understanding. Programs for adults with special needs are the first to go when cuts must be made.
Children who have special needs are able to receive at least some of the services that they require while they attend school. Many of these services are things that public schools are required to provide for students who need certain types of services. Schools that can’t provide for the needs of an individual child have to pay for that student to attend a private school that can do it.
Unfortunately, these types of laws do not protect students who are older than age eighteen, or who have completed their K-12 education. When the budget of a public school system gets tight, and requires cuts, one of the first things to go are the special education programs that are for adults who have special needs.
An example of this is happening in San Luis Obispo, California. Right now, the San Luis Coastal school district is one of only a few public school districts that offer any adult education classes for adults who have special needs. The district is experiencing “budget pressure”, and has decided to abruptly cut those programs.
When those programs started, they were a moneymaker for the district. School administrators learned that they were eligible to collect state enrollment dollars (also called average daily attendance), for each student that was enrolled in the program. Those funds were in addition to the money that was specifically marked for adult education. This is what allowed the adult special education program to flourish.
However, in 2009, changes happened. The state of California allowed struggling school districts to use those funds for other educational needs. Most decided to pull the funding from the adult education programs.
Now, many of those districts are claiming that their adult special education program is unsustainable, and are closing the program, and cutting the jobs of the teacher who were employed to work in them. The schools justify these cuts by saying that adults do not fit into the school’s core mission of providing education for students who are K- 12.
This leaves the adults with special needs who were learning job skills, life skills, and social skills from an adult education program to suddenly have to go without it. If this happens to your child, who has “aged out” of the public education system, there isn’t much that you can do about it.
One potential solution would be to see if your local college has a similar program. Some colleges have started offering classes for students who have intellectual disabilities. In general, to qualify for these programs a student must be at least age eighteen, and must have completed a high school special education program.
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