We can do better to protect students in special ed. Start with using the data.

Slapped. Pushed. Jerked by their hair. Pinched with clothespins. The cases of abuse in West Virginia’s special education classrooms are jaw-dropping — stunningly violent and cruel. It’s no wonder why a growing number of parents are afraid to send their children with disabilities to school.

It makes you wonder what has to happen to make the abuse stop. It’s not as if lawmakers haven’t tried.

About five years ago, abuse allegations of four children by special needs aides in Berkeley County schools led to legislation that placed cameras in special education classrooms. Legislators again responded to safety concerns in 2022 with bills that required increased reviewing of camera video and made it a felony for a person in a position of trust to abuse a child with disabilities verbally or physically or to neglect to report abuse they witnessed. Until then, it had been a misdemeanor crime.

But abuse cases continued. Camera video led to the convictions of teachers and aides for abusing special education students at Horace Mann Middle and Holz Elementary. One case led to the largest settlement against a public school board in West Virginia history.

In 2022, the legislature passed a bill that requires public school administrators to review at least 15 minutes of footage from each special education class at least every 90 days.

In 2023, the legislature passed a bill that included recording devices be present in the restroom of a self-contained special education classroom.

Recently, we’ve seen a Marion County teacher suspended for inappropriate physical force of a special education student, and the 2023 student services personnel — a special education aide— suspended following an incident with a student.

Last week, the West Virginia Board of Education declared a state of emergency in Hampshire County Schools’ special education program. This was announced as the state Board of Education released its 2023 County Approval Status and Accreditation Report, where 15 counties are listed as inefficient and need assistance with their special education programs.

What’s clear is that something is going very wrong in special education programs in public schools across the state, despite the efforts of lawmakers to address it.

This is a critical moment to make the case for data-driven policymaking.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a law that makes available free, appropriate public education to eligible children with disabilities and ensures special education and related services to them. IDEA provides for independent educational plans and requires schools to report certain data sets annually. This data holds value far beyond administrative and accountability purposes.

The reporting includes:

• The number of children and students served under IDEA each year and the disability category (There are 13.).
• The number of students suspended or expelled served by IDEA and the total number of days removed by disability.
• The number and percent of students ages 14 through 21 with disabilities who exited special education, and the reason(s) for the exit.
• The number of teachers employed to work with children ages 5 (in kindergarten) through 21.

This kind of data can shed light on what special education programs look like and how they’ve changed over the past ten or so years. For example: Have we seen more kids qualifying for special education? Have we seen an increase in specific disability categories, like emotional disturbances? Are there fewer teachers serving these students? Are parents choosing to remove their children from public schools, and why?

This data also has the potential to be used in more complex ways to better understand the challenges kids and schools are experiencing. Consider this: Researchers in Tennessee linked Medicaid and birth certificate data of infants born between 2008 and 2011 with a history of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) to Tennessee Department of Education special education data during early childhood. What the data revealed was that children with a history of NAS were significantly more likely to have a subsequent educational disability.

Could NAS or drug exposure in utero be driving up an increased demand for special education services here in West Virginia? And if so, what do those disabilities look like, and can we work with researchers and community resource and service providers to address these needs?

This is the sort of information that can inform in a way that goes beyond more cameras and harsher sentences.

Sadly, data is not always organized and structured in a useful way for the general public or experts working in these adjacent health and service areas.

A big step in that direction is ensuring that IDEA data is accessible and easy for all of us — parents, researchers, and advocates — not to mention the legislature. Our state should invest in the expertise to nudge the IDEA data past the current “lookup” system, designed mainly for federal accountability, and towards more engagement with the public, private sector firms and non-profit communities, and researchers working in education policy and adjacent issue areas.

Currently, IDEA data is delivered as a set of spreadsheets that neither suits the general public nor enables expert communities to integrate the data set with others and understand issues surrounding disability in a deeper way. Simply put, finding IDEA data should be easier, and it shouldn’t be reported as a series of spreadsheets that almost no one can understand. The State Auditor’s Office provides a great example with its local spending data of how data can be shared for general interests. If IDEA data was presented like this, it could be a foundational starting point in helping lawmakers understand what’s going on in our special education classes.

IDEA data can also be incredibly useful for researchers and advocates; its inherent value transcends mere accountability. This month, the WVU Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs published a report detailing recommendations for WVDE to report IDEA data so researchers, nonprofit organizations, and private sector service providers can use it.

Imagine the research community and nonprofit sector collaborating with lawmakers and public education to draw down research and philanthropic funding to address the complex challenges our special education classrooms face. But to do that, we’ll need data and expertise to analyze it and the willingness to be open and transparent about what the data shows.

That’s a tall order but a necessary step toward data-driven policymaking. And it would be a good-faith step from our government toward alleviating the continuing fears of parents of students with disabilities.