Everyone in Idaho education policy knows the number: $100 million. That’s the gap between what state and federal funding provides for special education and what it actually costs Idaho school districts to serve disabled children. It appears in budget analyses. State Superintendent Debbie Critchfield talks about where it will or won’t be prioritized in the IDOE’s budget proposals for the fiscal year. Most legislators acknowledge it, then ignore it.

What doesn’t get said is what that number looks like from inside a classroom. These numbers are attached to faces. In Idaho, there are 33,000 of them. They are Idaho’s disabled children. They are real people and citizens of this state.

Not enough adults in the room.

Idaho has among the lowest ratios of special education staff to students in the nation. Only Idaho and Ohio have fewer than 20 special education staffers per 200 students, compared to more than 60 in some states. That gap isn’t a staffing preference. It is the difference between a child receiving the one-on-one instruction their IEP legally requires and a child sitting in a room waiting for an adult who is already stretched across more students than any one person can serve.

Special education teachers in Idaho are not failing their students. They are burning out trying to serve them. Turnover at the Idaho Department of Education’s own special education division has more than doubled in the last two fiscal years. Nine out of ten state-level special education staff are new within the last five years. In the classroom, that churn is catastrophic. Every time a teacher leaves, a paraprofessional quits, or an aide doesn’t come back, a disabled child loses the relationship that made their education functional. For many of these children, consistency isn’t a comfort. It is a clinical requirement. You cannot implement a behavioral support plan with a substitute who has never met the child. You cannot deliver speech therapy from a vacancy.

IEPs that exist on paper but not in practice.

An Individualized Education Program is a legal document. It is the result of evaluations, meetings, parental input, and professional assessment. It specifies exactly what a child needs and exactly what the school is obligated to provide by law.

A state investigation of Soda Springs schools found that the learning lab serving students with IEPs didn’t have enough paraprofessionals to actually deliver instruction. Lesson plans were created but seldom followed. Staff turned over more than twice in a single school year. There wasn’t enough physical space for the number of students requiring specialized instruction. The district had no framework to ensure IEPs were being implemented at all. This is a direct result of a funding structure that requires districts to meet a federal mandate without the resources to do it.

Soda Springs is not an outlier. It is a documented example of what $100 million in unmet need looks like inside a classroom across Idaho. In 2023, Idaho’s own reviews of districts and charters found that just 20% were fully complying with federal disability law. The other 80% were falling short of the legal floor for disabled children’s education.

The highest-need children get the least protection.

In 2025, the Legislature rejected a $3 million proposal to help districts cover costs for students requiring full-time ASL interpreters or dedicated aides — the children with the greatest needs and the highest per-student costs. Three million dollars. Rejected by one vote. What passed instead was a $5 million catastrophic fund, accessible only after a district has already spent $30,000 on a single student and exhausted every other available resource including Medicaid — the same Medicaid benefits the Legislature spent that session attempting to cut for disabled Idahoans.

For 15 Years, Idaho Changed the Rules to Avoid the Cost.

For up to 15 years, Idaho operated an illegally high bar for qualifying children with specific learning disabilities written directly into its own special education manual. A higher bar meant fewer qualifying children. Fewer qualifying children meant a smaller and cheaper — obligation.

When parents pushed back after denials, districts moved children into the “other health impairment” category instead — a designation that doesn’t guarantee the same services. Dyslexia affects one in five children. Nationally, specific learning disability is the most common qualifying category for special education. In Idaho, it wasn’t. The manual made sure of it.

It took a federal order in October 2023 to end it. The advocacy firm that filed the complaint documented that thousands of children had been incorrectly identified. Idaho’s remediation reached 377. Those families were told teams would “consider” compensatory services. The children who aged out under the illegal standard received nothing.

The $100 million deficit is built on that foundation, through a manual Idaho wrote, controlled, and defended until a federal agency forced it to stop. It is discrimination built into policy, maintained for 15 years, and never fully accounted for.

The agency that issued that federal order was the Office of Special Education Programs. That order was addressed directly to Superintendent Critchfield. OSEP has since been reduced from roughly 170 staff to fewer than five. Critchfield has publicly reaffirmed her support for dismantling the federal department, saying Idaho is already “fulfilling the requirements of congressional acts and federal law” and doesn’t need federal agencies “to check a box on the job we’re doing.” Idaho’s own compliance reviews found that 20% of districts were meeting the legal floor. The other 80% were not.

Reading programs. Cut. Staff. Gone.

The funding collapse doesn’t stay inside special education classrooms. Districts are making cuts that land hardest on the students who can least afford to lose services. The Bonneville School District is considering eliminating dozens of staff positions and cutting reading programs. Twin Falls has already voted to cut approximately 20 staff. For a child with dyslexia, a processing disorder, or a language-based learning disability, specialized reading instruction is frequently the entire point of their IEP. When that program disappears, the IEP becomes a promise the school can no longer keep.

What comes next matters. What is happening right now matters more.

Superintendent Critchfield submitted her budget proposal on September 1 with a funding formula rewrite as her centerpiece — a model unchanged since 1994 that her office has been asked to redraft for the 2027 Legislature. In theory, a student-weighted formula would direct additional dollars to special education students. In practice, her budget proposal simultaneously cut the $5 million high-needs fund — the only concrete gain for disabled students in two years — down to $1.7 million to make room for that work.

The formula debate may eventually produce something. It has been ongoing for a decade.

The children sitting in under-resourced classrooms, waiting for aides who aren’t coming, receiving IEP services on paper but not in practice, are not a future policy problem. They are the current result of decisions already made. Every year the formula conversation continues without resolution is another year those children absorb the cost of an obligation the state has not met. The gap — $100 million and growing — lands on local school district general fund budgets. That is money districts pull from the same pool that pays for every other student’s education. Every dollar a district spends covering the state’s unfunded special education obligation is a dollar that does not go to a classroom, a teacher, a reading program, or a school that is already being asked to do more with less

Idaho has 33,000 students receiving special education services. The formula debate may eventually produce something. It has been ongoing for a decade. What no one has answered yet is whether the formula being drafted will include any binding legal obligation to fund special education at a specific level — or whether Idaho intends to pass a new structure that mentions disabled children with sufficient legally adequate appropriated dollars behind them?

 This is not a new question. 

Bessie Yeley is a Post-9/11 veteran, journalist, and mother of 3 public school children in the West Ada School District, including 1 who is disabled. She publishes Free Range Idaho on Substack and has been publicly vocal on Idaho’s special education funding crisis and the impact of state policy on disabled children.