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District reports rising special‑education enrollment and small increase in gifted identifications; staff propose universal screener and staffing additions
Summary
Staff presented 10‑year special‑education trends showing an increase to 22.6% of student enrollment in special services and a 25% increase in identified gifted students (12 students); administrators said they will implement universal screening and requested additional staff to support identification and testing.
District staff presented data to the education committee showing a rise in students receiving special education services over the past decade and a modest increase in identified gifted students.
Ms. Sefiri, who presented the enrollment figures, said the district’s special education count a decade earlier (the 2015–16 school year) was 836 students, representing 15.8% of the district population. "If we go back that 10 years, the fifteen‑sixteen school year would be that tenth year back. Our enrollment at that time was 836 students, which equated to a 15.8 percent of our population," she said.
She said the district saw a jump during the pandemic and in later years: the 2020–21 identification rate was 18.8% and the most recent figure she cited was 22.6%. Ms. Sefiri said the district reported 1,064 students receiving special education services on its most recent Dec. 1 count to the state.
Ms. Sefiri outlined disability‑category trends and said speech and language needs are a growing category among incoming kindergarten and first‑grade students. She said autism identifications reported in the 2018–19 school year were about 11% (as reported in the district figures she supplied) and are now just over 14% in the district’s data; she attributed that figure to a combination of medical diagnoses, records reviews and observed educational impact.
On gifted programming, Ms. Sefiri thanked the board for additional resources and said the district recorded a 25% increase in students identified for gifted and talented services this year, which she said equated to 12 additional students. She said gifted identification in the district rose from 1.02% at the start of the year to 1.2% and that the county average is about 4% of enrollment. She said the district’s stated goal is to raise the local identification rate by about one percentage point annually and that a single gifted teacher’s caseload guideline is 65 students; she said the current teacher has about 60 students.
Ms. Sefiri said the district plans to improve child‑find practices, implement a universal screener and broaden referral sources beyond parent requests (for example, via MTSS and teacher referrals). She told trustees the district has requested additional positions—a gifted teacher, an additional school psychologist and a coordinator—to accelerate identification and testing capacity.
Board members asked about the number of students who had applied for gifted evaluation and those still in process; Ms. Sefiri said she had seven students currently undergoing evaluation and said she could provide counts of students tested who did not qualify.
Administrators said staff will upload more detailed breakdowns by disability category to executive content and that they will return with supplemental data as requested by trustees. No formal policy changes or board votes were recorded on identification criteria during the meeting.
