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Board hears rising special-education caseload, cautions on limited high-cost reimbursements
Summary
At a presentation to the North Santiam SD 29J board, district special-programs staff reported 399 students on IEPs as of Dec. 1, 2025 and described how the state's $55 million high-cost reimbursement pot and a $30,000-per-student threshold leave districts with volatile and often small reimbursements for very expensive cases.
Miss Glover, the district's special-programs lead, told the board the Special Education Child Count (SECC) is a point-in-time census taken on Dec. 1 that drives federal and state funding and reporting. "As of December 1, at this point in time, we had 399 students on IEPs," she said, noting that figure was up from 387 the prior year.
Glover walked the board through why that matters for budgeting. She described the state's high-cost disability reimbursement program as a reimbursement pool of $55,000,000 with a per-student threshold of $30,000. "When it costs us more than $30,000 per student to educate a child, we get some portion of that amount over 30,000 back," she said, but cautioned the actual payout is a function of statewide claims and therefore unpredictable.
To illustrate variability, Glover offered district examples: in the 2022-23 school year the district submitted 15 students whose costs over $30,000 totaled about $711,000; after the statewide calculation the district received roughly $106,000 (about 41 cents on the dollar) in the May disbursement. The following year the district had 23 students over the threshold with total over-threshold costs exceeding $1,000,000 and ultimately received about $127,000 at a lower rate (about 32 cents on the dollar). "We put that money out. We pay it. It's baked in there, and then we have to wait a whole year to figure out how much we're going to get back," a board member summarized during the briefing.
Board members asked about drivers of the increase. Glover and her colleagues said the district and others are seeing students with more complex needs (for example, rising speech needs and higher counts of medical conditions such as diabetes). She noted that the reimbursement program is intended to help but covers only a portion and that the fixed statewide pot has not meaningfully risen in years.
The presentation closed with a discussion of the operational burden of documenting services precisely (hours, supplies, contracted placements) to maximize allowable claims and with board members pressing for follow-up on legislative advocacy and budget implications.
