For Texans with disabilities, the 2023 legislative session offered mixed results.
Advocacy organizations won a long fight to increase wages for personal care attendants. But other initiatives related to education and voting accessibility didn’t become law.
For the 2025 session, disability groups say some items will return to their legislative wishlist.
Advocates will also keep an eye on how education savings account, or ESA, bills could affect opportunities for students with disabilities in the state.
Jolene Sanders is advocacy director for the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities. She says private schools are not required to accept students with disabilities under many ESA proposals. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Let’s start with education savings accounts, or ESAs. They’re a big priority for the governor, and supporters say they could benefit special education students.
How does your organization view these programs, which would provide parents with support to send kids to private schools?
Jolene Sanders: Over several sessions we’ve seen proposals for ESAs and specifically for those students who are eligible for special education services. However, we know that across the state, first of all, access to private schools is limited. Whether that is based on religion, gender, age… And private schools are not required to serve all students with disabilities or to come up with a comprehensive educational plan.
Additionally, if they do accept students with disabilities, they have the ability to charge extra for any related services, like speech therapy or any accommodations the student may need to participate at school.
They also don’t have to keep them. If a student enrolls and their parent accesses that ESA to enroll them and pay for tuition, the private school has the ability to say, “okay, we can’t serve your kid,” and then that money is lost. We’ve seen instances where the parents have, on their own, tried to privately place their kids and the school has said, “yeah, well, we can’t refund you for the remainder of the year. It’s been prepaid.”
But again, the federal protections and rights for students with disabilities are abandoned at the door of a private school. So those federal protections have components of due process for the family if they’re not being served in public school, has certain requirements to provide school health and related services like therapies…
It also ensures that the parent has a strong role in the committee that develops the educational plan. They are an equal member of that committee, if you will, which is referred to as Admission, Review, and Dismissal, or ARD, committee. And they are instrumental in the development of the plan for the student. And then as the student reaches the age of majority, they are also making decisions as well.
So would you like to see education savings accounts not pass at all? Or do you see a path forward if this is the way the Legislature goes?
It’s certainly a priority for the governor and the lieutenant governor. But what we at CTD and other advocacy partners would like to see is we have to fix the public education system first – the public education system that has been failing students with disabilities and has been woefully underfunded for far too long.
We need to look at some of these things that there was consensus on, like a multitiered funding formula where schools receive funding per student based on the service intensity. So how much therapy is this kid getting? Do they need these additional resources instead of how it currently is funded, which is by location? So what percentage of time is this student outside of the general education classroom?
And what, sadly, that does is kind of perversely incentivizes schools to place kids with disabilities in more restrictive settings.
For example, you’ve got Sam who can go into the general education classroom, but he needs some accommodations or he needs to be pulled out for speech therapy, or maybe he needs an aide during passing periods. But because we’re funding based on the physical placement of the student, a lot of kids are being denied those services that they could have to access their least restrictive environment. And a lot of students are being placed in, like I said, more self-contained settings, which could be a mix of ages and grades.
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Well, I understand you’re also focusing on child care and pre-K eligibility for kids with disabilities. Can you talk about what you want from lawmakers there?
Yeah, absolutely. CTD is strongly supporting inclusive childcare and access for families.
There is a bill, HB 174, by Rep. Mary Gonzalez, and she has championed this bill. This will be the fourth session. And this just ensures that families and childcare providers are aware of the obligation under the Americans with Disabilities Act to at least make an assessment to see if they can serve a child in child care.
Whereas currently what we’re seeing is providers who are adopting policies that they don’t take kids with disabilities at all. And that is in direct violation of federal law. However, a lot of providers are not aware of that requirement.
This bill also has a training component to include not just typical child development, but how to identify developmental delays. There is also an early childhood mental health component in it and a guarantee that early childhood intervention specialists who may be working with a child with a disability have access to that kid in their natural environment when they are in child care. We don’t expect caregivers to be everything, but we do want to have, at least, access for these families so that they can can work and also provide resources to the caregivers so that they can better serve kids.
As far as pre-K eligibility, HB 3 several sessions ago established a four-day pre-K program for certain students. For example, those who are children of military parents, first responders, those who are Medicaid eligible, those who are English language learners. We have all of these specific categories. However, we would like to see students with disabilities added as an eligibility category so that these families can access the four-day program as it stands right now.
Early Childhood Special Education, which provides services to students three through five, is typically only a half-day program. And so families are having to make the very difficult decision, as “do I want to get my kid these interventions for half a day, or do I want to keep them either in child care or stay with a relative so that I can work?” And so we want to make sure that these kids have access to inclusion and full-day programing and that these families are able to work.
Well, I mentioned in the introduction that in 2023, personal care attendants did get a raise from the Legislature for the first time in a number of years. But I understand you’re looking for another increase this year. Why is the money needed so soon?
Well, I think we’re already way, way behind on what we should have been funding for a very long time.
As you mentioned, this is the biggest bump we’ve ever seen that was received in 2023. But it’s still woefully inadequate. It’s difficult to find and retain caregivers, and the quality of a caregiver is often diminished.
We want to be able to build a workforce of highly skilled caregivers so that people with disabilities are able to live in the community, live in their home with the assistance that they need. And also, for this workforce, that they are able to feed their families.
What is the rate right now?
Currently, it’s $10.60 an hour. So if you think about looking at competitive wages across various industries over, say, even the last 20 years, it’s not keeping up. And this is some of the most critical work and these are dedicated caregivers.
But they don’t have benefits. They don’t necessarily have guaranteed hours. And these are people who also have families and these are individuals who may also be accessing public benefits because their wage is simply not high enough.
And so we would like to ask the Legislature this session, as part of a personal care attendant coalition, is to raise that to $19 an hour.
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Well, I know we’ve hit on on some of your top priority issues and we’re not going to be able to hit them all. But is there another one or two you’d mentioned briefly?
CTD is also looking at a number of other policies in the education space. We are working to eliminate the practice of informal suspensions or early pickups that are typically targeting students with disabilities, and they’re losing out on access to education.
We are looking at some protections for school threat assessments for students with disabilities so that they are not disproportionately getting funneled into more restrictive disciplinary settings or even the juvenile justice system.
Voting rights has always been a priority for CTD, and we’ve made some strides over the last several sessions, and we hope to keep moving the needle.
And then, of course, always important is health care access and affordability that’s critical for everyone. But there are even higher hurdles and more barriers for people with disabilities.
