To Keep your Special Needs Child on Track, Follow the Money

ByThoughtsworththinking.com

A key to keeping your chlid with ADHD, anxiety, and/or other special needs on track is follow the money that’s supposed to support them.

This could be money in your child’s public school’s budget to provide special education services specified in his/her Individualized Education Program (IEP). This funding is provided by the federal government through the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA). It may also be tuition money you pay for your child to attend a summer camp, or a private school.

Whether the money government funding your child is entitled to under the law or your own hard earned savings, it’s important to recognize motivations and behaviors that can steer money the wrong way.

Let’s say your child’s public school has been a good partner in providing special education support, agreeing that your child is entitled to an IEP with special education services with which he/she had been on track. But things have recently changed, perhaps with new middle school challenges and adapting to the teen years, and your student is struggling. Meanwhile, you are learning about special programs in your district at other schools for students who need them to learn.

You raise the possibility of moving your child to another school, but now the administrators who’ve long been supportive aren’t so helpful. You try to familiarize yourself with the school system’s special programs through the district’s web page, but the information is too generic for you to get a sense of whether any of them would align with your child’s needs. When you try to request a visit to learn more about these programs, you get pushback because your current school hasn’t yet agreed your child needs a placement change. You’re stuck in a loop where you don’t know what program to push for because you don’t know enough about them, but you can’t learn more without the school’s permission, and the process to get it may take months for time needed to schedule a meeting and gather data. Meanwhile, your child is struggling.

Why the new, unhelpful attitude, where process prevents you from obtaining legitimate information to navigate your child’s path? One explanation may be because you’re going in a direction that could take money from your public school. A 2003 U.S. Department of Education study based on the 1999-2000 school year found that the average special education student incurs an additional $5,420 in costs. Students with specific learning disabilities (SLD’s) averaged $4,071 more, and those with “Other Health Impairments”–which is how students with ADHD are usually coded–$6,510 more.1 And these are just averages; if your student needs a special placement outside the general education environment it could be much more. With inflation since 2000, the value of these figures in 2026 dollars has almost doubled. So your school could lose the justification for over $10,000 in funding if your child leaves.

Now you know one reason to suspect why they may not be helping anymore, and your child will remain struggling in the wrong school while you struggle to overcome the resistance.

The monetary factor may also arise when it’s tuition money you’re paying, though the consequences can play out differently. Let’s say you’re sending your child to overnight camp, which costs a pretty penny. Camps compete for families to send their kids, and depend on steady enrollment to survive. With 11.4% of U.S. children being diagnosed with ADHD,2 it’s just too big a market to ignore, and some mainstream camps market to families as being inclusive to campers with ADHD and other neurological differences.

In maximizing enrollments, a camp may bite off more than they can chew. Lightly trained, inexperienced young counselors may not be equipped to provide the support a child needs, including “aid and fade” support to help a special needs camper integrate into the bunk. Medication support can be inadequate, including kids with meds waiting on long lines that take time away from building friendships with other campers, and making medication mistakes that can affect a camper’s behavior.

The consequences may be mild or short term–not your child’s favorite summer, and he or she wants to try a new camp next year. But they can also be much more severe. It may not be much skin off a camp’s teeth to kick a child out because they can’t or haven’t provided the right support You child may even be blamed for fabricated conduct infractions because the camp’s failure to provide promised support caused a frustrated and misunderstood child to exhibit uncharacteristic behaviors.

Of course these things can happen because of the money. To reach that 11.4% of their market, a camp may risk underserving a small number of those kids, with potentially devastating consequences for the child. This isn’t to say that a regular camp with an inclusive approach isn’t going to be the right fit. But as a parent you need to ask hard questions about the camp’s fidelity in providing support in addition to being totally transparent with the camp about your child’s differences. How experienced are the counselors in working with special needs children, and what is the counselor to camper ratio in a bunk? Are counselors recruited from abroad, and if so what experiences relating to a U.S. overnight camp environment do they have.

Similar concerns can transpire in conjunction with choosing a private school, with even bigger consequences for a child’s future if it turns out to be the wrong one.

The common thread in these examples is that money can influence the party that’s supposed to be providing support. A public school can be motivated to keep funding to pool for use among all its IEP students. So too, a camp seeks to fill its bunks. Certainly, a parents should be vigilant to control what they can to sure a child’s best placement, including full disclosure about the child to providers, and using resources to find out what they can about programs. This may at time include hiring consultants if within the family’s means. However, the more you understand these motivations, the better equipped you’ll be to counter them.

The take away here is to be aware of financial motivations organizations involved or potentially involved in your child’s special needs support have, and how they can affect outcomes. Whether it’s money you’re paying to a camp or school, or the school district’s special education funding your child is entitled to, you need to make sure your child is in the right place to benefit from it, and is actually receiving those benefits.

  1. Total Expenditures for Students with Disabilities, 1999-2000: Spending Variation by Disability, Special Education Expenditure Project (SEEP), Report 5, June 2003, U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, available at Total Expenditures for Students with Disabilities, 1999-2000: Spending Variation by Disability, available at http://www.csef-air.org/publications/seep/national/Final_SEEP_Report_5.PDF. ↩︎
  2. Data and Statisitics for ADHD, U.S. Centers for Disease Control, https://www.cdc.gov/adhd/data/index.html ↩︎