‘Shot down at every turn’

by Flatwater Free Press

Editor’s Note: This story was produced in partnership with The 74, a national nonprofit news organization covering America’s education system from early childhood through college and career.
Angela Gleason knew something was wrong with her son’s education by the time he began first grade in Omaha Public Schools. 
The district moved Teddy, who has autism and is nonverbal, from a behavioral skills class to general education. His struggles brought on outbursts of running around the room and disrupting his classmates, leading to near-daily phone calls asking Gleason to come get him.  
Feeling hopeless, Gleason applied for a transfer to Millard Public Schools in 2018. But the district said its special education program had no room for Teddy.
Year after year, Gleason applied to Millard and received the same response, even as the district later accepted two of her other children who didn’t need special education services. She tried other Omaha-area districts. Westside. Then Bellevue. Both rejected Teddy.
“It’s very disheartening as a parent to try repeatedly to get your child with disabilities accepted into a different school district, and to be told ‘no’ over and over and over again,” she said.
A 35-year-old Nebraska law lets students transfer from one public school district to another — a policy known as option enrollment. 
Today, more than 25,000 students attend schools outside their home district. But for hundreds of kids like Teddy, the program hasn’t lived up to its promise, despite a provision barring districts from considering students’ disabilities as part of their admission standards.
In 2023-24, Bellevue Public Schools and 39 other districts rejected only kids with disabilities while accepting option applications from other students. Several suburban Omaha districts, such as Millard and Papillion La Vista, denied students with disabilities at massively disproportionate rates.
Across Nebraska, students with individualized education programs (IEPs) made up 38 percent of the option enrollment rejections despite accounting for 17 percent of school kids, according to a data analysis of a first-of-its-kind state report.
Administrators and education lobbyists say an increasingly dire shortage of special education staff is to blame. The law allows districts to reject applications if they lack the ability or space to accommodate more kids.
Nebraska schools reported 150 unfilled special ed teaching posts last year, and that doesn’t include dozens of vacancies districts gave up on filling, said Tim Royers, president of the state teachers union.
Adding more option students to already stretched-thin special ed classrooms would decrease the quality of education for students while exacerbating burnout that’s driving teachers out of the profession faster than schools can replace them, Royers said.
Critics say schools have long ignored state law and manipulated transfer enrollment to best serve their bottom line — and their athletic teams — at the expense of kids with disabilities.
A bipartisan bloc of state lawmakers, including Sen. Danielle Conrad, tried unsuccessfully in the just-concluded legislative session to pass a bill that would have barred districts from disproportionately rejecting transfers from students with disabilities. 
The Democrat from Lincoln said the high rejection rate for students with disabilities can’t be explained away by staffing troubles: “That’s discrimination, plain and simple.”

Dividing lines
When the Nebraska Legislature took up a proposal to allow option enrollment in 1989, supporters pitched it as a way to boost parental engagement and competition among school districts. Opponents warned it could undermine neighborhood schools.  
The bill narrowly passed, making the state one of the policy’s earliest adopters. About 370 kids formed the inaugural class of option students.
The law prohibited schools from creating rejection standards based on “handicapping conditions,” but it didn’t require districts to provide data on their rejections.
Spurred by persistent complaints from fed-up parents, lawmakers passed a bill in 2023 mandating that districts determine their special education capacity on a case-by-case basis rather than closing their whole program to option students. 
The bill also required public schools to tell the state how many option applications they rejected from students with and without disabilities.
The report released last year by the Nebraska Department of Education revealed a widespread practice among districts of denying students with IEPs at disproportionate rates. 
Bellevue Public Schools stood out from the pack: All 30 of the district’s denials during the 2023-24 school year were students with IEPs. The district later confirmed that of more than 250 option students it accepted that year, only 10 had active IEPs.
Michele Zephier’s son, Dylan, was among those denied a transfer to Bellevue in 2018 after poor experiences in Omaha and Millard schools.
Dylan, who has Down syndrome and autism, was being secluded up to eight times a day because of his behavior while in third grade in the Millard district, Zephier said. He was often absent because he dreaded coming to school. 
The district declined to comment on individual students, but said in a statement that it “works as a team with families to place children in the least restrictive environment possible.”
After Bellevue rejected Dylan, Zephier sold her house and moved to a small apartment inside the district’s boundaries, guaranteeing enrollment.
The district cited staffing shortages as the reason for the rejections. At the start of the 2023-24 school year, the district was down four special ed teachers and 29 paraprofessionals.
“The decision to deny an application is never made lightly,” the statement said. “We fully recognize the impact these decisions have on families, and we continue actively working to recruit and retain qualified staff to support our students.”
During the two years Zephier lived in the Bellevue district, Dylan was often secluded in an adjoining room for such behaviors as pushing teachers away and shoving items off his desk, she said. 
In a last-ditch attempt to find a better environment, she broke her lease, drained her savings and moved to Lincoln in 2020. It paid off. 
“All those bad behaviors disappeared. Now he’s included. He’s in the band. He performed in the state band competition. He’s had solos on the stage,” Zephier said.

Locked out of the suburbs
In the Omaha area, option enrollment has long resembled a one-way street out of OPS and into higher-achieving suburban schools. 
Last year, more than 5,700 kids opted out of OPS to attend other districts, while just 875 went in the other direction. 
Option enrollment has been a boon for suburban districts such as Millard and Westside, allowing them to fill seats and keep their per-student costs down, said former state Sen. Lou Ann Linehan, a Republican.
But critics contend that the same districts taking in hundreds of option students won’t give kids with disabilities a fair shake. 
In 2023, Millard Public Schools enrolled the most new option students in the state, but 27 of its 34 denials were students with IEPs. What the state report didn’t show, said spokeswoman Rebecca Kleeman, is that the district had accepted 60 percent of the kids with IEPs who applied that year and more than 90 percent the year prior. 
“We exist to educate children, and we want to accept as many as we can. We also want to be careful not to exceed capacity of any program so that we can serve our students effectively,” Kleeman said in an email.
Westside Community Schools received about 700 option applications, more than any other Nebraska district, and rejected about half. Roughly 25 percent of the denials had IEPs. 
The district welcomes option students, “but our first responsibility is to the families who live in our district, so we must ensure we have adequate space, staff and services for all students,” said district spokeswoman Elizabeth Power in a statement.
In Papillion La Vista, students with disabilities made up 14 percent of accepted option applications but 56 percent of rejections in the 2023-24 school year. 
The disproportionate denial rates developed because the school board voted to close its K-12 special education program to option students for the year. The district just didn’t have enough teachers and staff to take on more students, said spokesman Christopher Villarreal. It reversed course following the enactment of the 2023 law, but capacity issues remain, he said. 
”You accept up to a certain point, and then you say, now I can’t accept any more,” said Tammy Voisin, Papillion La Vista’s director of special services.
Conrad said the “capacity argument just doesn’t hold any water for me,” since districts would have to find a way to provide special ed services to families like the Zephiers that move within their boundaries. 
“We can’t just throw up our hands and say ‘capacity’ if I move into the district, but that’s what we’re doing right now for kids and families with special needs who want to utilize option enrollment,” she said at a February bill hearing.
Voisin said that when the special ed program is full and a student with disabilities moves into the district, administrators “figure it out” by shifting teachers to different buildings or hiring more staff. But because the school board sets firm staffing numbers each fall for the following year, she said, the district can’t suddenly hire more people if it receives too many option enrollment requests.
State Sen. Dave Murman, who sponsored the bill to ban the disproportionate denial of kids with IEPs, said districts that receive more option students than they lose are typically better staffed in special ed than those like Omaha, where students are trying to transfer out.
Those “option positive” districts should be more easily able to adjust their staffing to take in additional students with disabilities than OPS is, said the Republican lawmaker from Glenvil. 
OPS’ teacher shortage grew so severe in 2023 that it eliminated special ed programs at three North Omaha elementary schools a week before the school year started. The district gave about 140 families the option to move their kids to another school or forgo their IEP accommodations. 
Staffing levels have improved from that low point, and special ed programs at the three schools returned last year. But Nebraska’s biggest district still faces gaping personnel holes, including vacancies for 62 special ed teachers, 63 classroom support staffers and 20 speech pathologists. 
The district has “a deep commitment to student success” and actively recruits staff year round in a competitive marketplace to meet students’ needs, an OPS statement said. 
Lawmakers also say they recently have increased state funding for special ed and for per-pupil payments in districts that take lots of option kids, making it financially viable to accept transfers with disabilities. 
Former state Sen. Justin Wayne, a Democrat from Omaha, said the issue comes down to districts not wanting “to deal with kids who may require a little more work.” 
“Elected, connected or sports is how you’re getting into schools now,” Wayne said. “Every reason that I’ve heard in the Legislature of why a school district may or may not take a kid in the Omaha area, to me, they’re just flat-out lying.”
Royers, the union president, acknowledged that some districts may have taken disability rejections too far — especially for students with slight hearing loss or other minor disabilities that don’t require special accommodations. Those districts should be held accountable, he said.
But in most cases, he said, staffing shortages are the real barrier.

Rural rejection
The uneven denial of students with disabilities in Omaha-area districts has been playing out on a small scale in small towns. 
In fall 2015, Gary Shada didn’t know that moving his family to a house a mile outside of the Pierce Public Schools district in northeast Nebraska would upend his daughter’s education.
Shada, a longtime teacher and coach in the district, hoped his two young kids could keep going to Pierce schools through option enrollment. 
The district accepted his son’s application but turned down his daughter Kylee, who has Down syndrome, because the elementary school’s special education program was at capacity.
Shada appealed to the Nebraska State Board of Education, but it upheld Pierce’s decision. 
Kylee, who just completed seventh grade, is still enrolled in a neighboring district while her brother is in Pierce. Last school year, Shada hoped Kylee could try option enrollment again and attend Pierce High School, but he said Superintendent Kendall Steffensen told him it’s not going to happen.
Steffensen couldn’t be reached for comment after multiple attempts.
“I just got shot down at every turn. But I’m not saying that Pierce did anything different than any other district would do. That’s why I feel that something has got to change when it comes to option enrollment and kids with special needs,” Shada said.
Few parents have appealed denials, as Shada did, and even fewer have succeeded.
Since 2008, the State Board of Education has ruled on 15 appeals of applications rejected for special education capacity shortages, including two that were later withdrawn. The elected panel overturned only two denials.

Stalled out at the Capitol
The recent proposal that failed to advance in the Legislature would have prohibited districts from denying option applications from most kids with disabilities at rates beyond the statewide percentage of students with IEPs — currently about 17 percent. 
School administrators resisted the bill from the start and kept the pressure on their local lawmakers to oppose it, said Murman, the legislator who introduced the measure.
Hastings Public Schools Superintendent Jeff Schneider told Murman’s committee in February that the bill’s passage would force his district to consider taking “a backward step” by closing option enrollment to all students.
The district has capacity in general education, but “we are overloaded in special ed ... so, this scares the heck out of us because we are already struggling,” Schneider said. 
The bill never came before the full Legislature — Murman knew he didn’t have the votes. He plans to work out kinks in the bill with opponents and try again next year. 
For Gleason, fighting for Teddy’s education is still a priority, but she doesn’t think she’ll apply to districts again next year since the bill didn’t pass. She said moving to a different district might be the answer.
“Trying to find support outside of OPS is nearly impossible,” she said. “Because if you try to opt into another district, you probably aren’t going to get in — not if your child has an IEP.”
Written by Jeremy Turley and Lauren Wagner for The Flatwater Free Press, Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.