Reply to MCPS is executing significant changes to special education that directly affect autistic students and their families.

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Reply to "MCPS is executing significant changes to special education that directly affect autistic students and their families."

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Didn't MCPS dramatically increase the budget number for special ed in last year's budget to hire a large number of personnel to fill the gap in the school setting?  Is it possible that, with that, the overall special ed level of effort at central became less necessary, and that these cuts reflect that?[/quote]

I think that was a big marketing ploy honestly. And even when Taylor was pushing that he admitted that MCPS was understaffed and this was a push to get special education staffing where it should be, not that they'd have extra resources. If you look at last year's budget you can see they did add more special education teachers than the year before- 170 for FY26 compared to 46 for FY25, but that's not even enough to put one more special education teacher in each school. Part of that number will just be normal staffing allocations every school gets if their special ed numbers increase as well. Also, the big paraeducator increase in the budget is mainly from transitioning part time staff to full time staff with benefits so there aren't actually 500 more paras in the schools.

The teachers will only be as good as the training and support they get. Taylor has continuously cut the central office support staff, and it was pretty offensive how he vaguely characterized it as getting rid of extra bloat when the high level admin who aren't in schools stayed or were increased and the people actually going IN the schools to directly help got cut. We see it happening again with the social workers this year. The attitude from Dr. Cage from the get-go has been that special ed is a mess and she's here to fix it- no interest or curiosity in how things are done or figuring out what has worked well. Just a dismantling because they think they know better.

Page 26-27: https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/siteassets/district/departments/budget/fy2026/fy2026_boe_operatingbudge_final_03_05_2025.pdf

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