The Colorado Department of Early Childhood has redesigned the way it places preschoolers with disabilities into classrooms that can meet their needs in response to increased scrutiny and a lawsuit filed last year by school districts and education advocacy organizations.
The change to the state’s expanded preschool program — known as universal preschool — follows school districts’ struggles to ensure students with special needs landed in preschool settings that could accommodate the kinds of extra support owed to them under state and federal law.
School districts say they experienced major hiccups in the program’s inaugural year, when the state’s student enrollment system, called BridgeCare, failed to match all students with disabilities with programs that could give them the targeted instruction and additional help they required.
That made districts vulnerable to violating state and federal rules that guarantee special education services to children with disabilities, district administrators said, and was one of the major reasons they brought state education officials and Gov. Jared Polis to court. Their lawsuit, however, was dismissed earlier this month after a Denver district court judge ruled the plaintiffs did not have legal grounds to sue, Chalkbeat Colorado first reported.
But their concerns have stayed with the Department of Early Childhood, which revised the way it pairs kids with disabilities and preschool programs so that the enrollment process is “as seamless as possible for both families and districts,” Universal Preschool Director Dawn Odean told The Colorado Sun.
The new preschool program offers up to 15 hours of free preschool per week for kids in the year before they enter kindergarten and additional subsidized hours for students with disabilities who come from low-income households.
In the first year of the program, all families enrolled in universal preschool the same way, through BridgeCare. A family with a student with a disability would apply in the system and note that their child had an individualized education program plan, or IEP, which outlines the services, resources and specialized instruction their student needs.
Oftentimes, families and school districts had already decided which preschool program was best for their student. But the application process prompted them to select a preschool location, which “created some unknowns and was disruptive,” Odean said.
The department’s inability to directly match preschoolers with IEPs to appropriate programs was a symptom of a new enrollment system that was created within “a very compressed timeline,” Odean said.
That enrollment program also wasn’t accessible to school districts and providers to jump in and manually change where a student was placed for preschool, which became a point of frustration for districts and providers.
Odean said the Department of Early Childhood limited how much control it granted districts and providers in BridgeCare because of uncertainty about “what could occur if they had access to different parts of the system and what the ripple effects might be.”
“It’s part of, I think, the growing pains of a new program and our unknown enrollment processes starting from scratch and then also building a new system at the same time and being thoughtful about what is actually doable,” she said.
Now, the Department of Early Childhood has developed a separate enrollment process for preschoolers with disabilities in BridgeCare so that a student is directly assigned to a program that aligns with their IEP. When a family of a student with special needs fills out the application, they indicate that their child has an IEP. The application is then transferred to the district that advised the family on the IEP so the district can verify the placement.
So far, 3,188 students with an IEP are set to participate in universal preschool this school year, according to figures provided by the Department of Early Childhood.
The new process is “a step in the right direction,” but has not solved every problem, said Mat Aubuchon, executive director of learning services at Westminster Public Schools.
His district has received a spreadsheet from the state department outlining kids with IEPs who need to be placed at specific preschool sites, according to information from BridgeCare. District staff are now working to verify each student on that list with their own class rosters.
Questions have emerged throughout that process, particularly around families who have left the district and are enrolling their student in a different preschool program. That leaves Aubuchon’s team wondering where students of those families are.
Districts encountered that kind of challenge even before the state introduced universal preschool, Aubuchon said, but now they have another state agency they must communicate with, which adds to their work.
Will the new enrollment process put all kids with IEPs in the right classrooms? It’s a waiting game.
In 27J Schools in Brighton, preschool staff have found more ease in connecting students with IEPs with the proper programs.
“This new process has given districts the ability to edit a student’s profile and put them in the correct school on the backend rather than having to go through the state to try to get that done,” said Bethany Ager, the district’s early childhood education director.
There’s one caveat: Districts can only make changes to students’ applications while they’re still in the process of enrolling in universal preschool. Once a family accepts a match for a spot at a specific preschool and is officially enrolled, a district can no longer adjust their application.
Still, Ager is optimistic that the new approach to enrolling preschoolers with disabilities will “cut the errors down drastically.”
“We have some power in a limited capacity with a small group of kids,” she said. “There’s been great strides in the right direction.”
Aubuchon said he sees the state department actively trying to improve the enrollment system. But he also sees the need for a more efficient system — one that does not require so much back-and-forth communication among parents, districts and providers, and the state to secure the right placement for students.
“We’ve been enrolling kids in preschool for 30 years,” he said. “We know how to do it. I know (the Department of Early Childhood) is an added wrinkle, but we still should be able to do the majority of enrollment at the local level.”
The new enrollment process will create an extra workload for districts and providers, Odean acknowledged, but she anticipates the process will ease the administrative burden in the long run.
“It’s still change, and so with any change we certainly recognize that that equals work,” Odean said. “I definitely don’t want to diminish that there is work with any new change, and this is a big one. This is a big change for the whole state. And so I want to be very respectful that people are putting more thinking and more effort into it, but I think we’re all aligned (with) the end in mind for it being easier over time.”
Whether the new enrollment system will prevent all preschoolers with disabilities from stepping into classrooms that can’t accommodate them remains to be seen until the first week of school.
“On paper, it’s looking like we’re going to get most of them,” Aubuchon said, “but I want to see them when they actually land in the door.”