District 65: Taxis and Private Therapeutic Schools 📈
An exploration into cost increases and embarrassingly bad data presented to the Board
The Evanston Roundtable posted a good story on the budget issues with District 65 - I’ve been working on my own story, but doing the whole thing is taking forever. So I’m going to break it up into parts. Here’s the first part.
Taxi Ride Cost 📈
The cost for taxi rides has gone up like crazy. Before COVID, District 65 was spending less than a million dollars on taxi rides and now, it’s more than $4.5 million dollars.
Most of these rides are operated by a company called Britelift. I FOIA’ed some documents related to this:
Britelift Bills for Jan 2024 - May 2024 - All the invoices
Single Month Detail For Out of District Trips - A single months invoice detail showing costs for out-of-district trips, some costing hundreds of dollars for one-way!
Brightlift Contract - Copy of the Britelift Contracted signed by Dr. Horton on 8/22/2022.
The Britelift bills are pretty wild: for one, according to the contract, it costs $40 before you’ve even moved an inch. Then there are fees for all sorts of things, such as aides, harnesses, city surcharges, and so on. These fees add up - the detail shows that there are one-way trips that cost more than $320, as much as a flight to Los Angeles.1
Here’s a summary of the invoices for 2024 from Britelift.
I asked Britelift for comment and you can read their comment here. They note that not all the kids they bus are special education students;
Additionally, we’ve transported gifted children who attend their home school for most classes but go to a local college for specialized subjects, such as math.
I find it hard to believe that we’re busing K-8 students to college - however, District 65 does bus gifted math kids to ETHS and around the District - in 2020-21, they dismantled advanced math (geometry) in the middle schools and centralized the program in a single school.
This is part of a larger trend during the Horton administration that the Roundtable wrote about, where programs in individual schools (such as cross-categorical classrooms or gifted math) were dismantled and replaced with centralized programs, requiring taxis.
It’s not clear to me why the District in 2020-21 prioritized this approach. I’ve gone back and watched the meetings; there is a broad concern about the equity of these programs but it is never really clear why this was the solution? The District 65 Board talks all the time about having (special ed/twi/math) programs within local schools that are walkable, so why did they dismantle the local programs and start busing kids kids around like crazy? I really don’t get it.
Special Education Out-Placement Cost 📈
At the same time as the taxi mess above, the District’s payments for therapeutic school tuition has gone up 64% in the last year.
I think there are a lot of things going on with this line item - it’s hard to get exact numbers on the number of students in these programs, because none of the reports presented to the board line up. Consider this report, from May 2024 showing a general decrease in students placed in in “Separate Settings”:
But then just a year earlier in 2023, this same report shows a completely different trend, which showed a general increase in students in “separate settings.”
So, I have no idea. Is the trend going up or down? You can look at the report from 2022, which shows a completely different set of numbers. Also, none of these numbers in any form line up with State’s School Report Card, which shows even lower numbers. After that, I don’t trust any of these reports - something else for the District 65 Board to add to their list of “things to audit.”
With that said, one possible source for the cost increase is the reimbursement from the state, which is tied to…
Enrollment 📉 = State Reimbursement 📉
During the 2020-2024 era, I got the sense that there was a belief that since most of District 65’s funding comes from local revenue (not tied to enrollment) - who cares if people leave? Dr. Horton even kind of expressed this in his exit interview video:
If you want to take your child out because you want some focus on your child then by all means go to a private school
But it turns out that when it comes to reimbursements for special education, this matters quite a bit! Consider how the State views District 65’s enrollment (these are extracted from state reports at this URL):
I want to point out a few things:
Total Enrollment is down 17% since 2015-16.
Special Education (ie students with IEPs) is up 10% since 2015-16. 19% of District 65 students have an IEP vs the State Average of 15%.2
The District 65 “Per Cap” has doubled (from $12k to $23k) since 2015-16.
Anyway, it’s a big problem that the “per cap” has doubled. Why? Because of the state reimbursement formula for private school tuition. Consider the state law and guidance that the ISBE issues (bold is mine):
Private Tuition (105 ILCS 5/14-7.02)
…
In practice, there is no district with a per capita tuition rate less than $4,500; therefore, the district is obligated for two times their district per capita tuition charge and the state reimburses the district for the remainder of the approved tuition rate paid for the school year, including summer school when approved. If a student is enrolled less than a full year, all items are prorated down accordingly
OK - the District is required to pay 2 x the “per cap” charge for kids placed in private placements. But the per cap for D65 has doubled over a six year span due to enrollment drops with no corresponding cost decrease! If D65 was paying $12,000x 2 = $24,000 for a private placement in 2019, they’re now paying basically double that.
Stay tuned for more stories on busing, in particular, my next story will feature the other bus company, Positive Connections.
Right now, I can buy a mid-day economy flight to Los Angeles for $328.
I didn’t appreciate is that while parents of non-special education students can vote with their feet and leave, it is much harder for parents of special education students. Many of the private/parochial schools won’t accept or are not equipped to support special education needs.
I just want to clarify a few things as someone whose child has used these services. I am not surprised that Brightlift is expensive. They also had major staffing issues and didn't have enough drivers for a while. My guess is pay is low as well, so the drivers are not always that great and the vehicles are not exactly top of the line (my kid was in a car with several others when the driver announced she couldn't stop and kept going until she got to the next exit on the Edens and I heard from my kid well before I heard from the company). The "taxis" in some cases are minivans that pick up multiple kids from Evanston who are going to the same outplacement school. Sometimes the car doesn't show up. Sometimes it's super early. Sometimes it's late. There is another company called Citicare that ETHS uses. Having experienced both, Brightlift is the better option.
I know that the special education schools are technically "private" but I think it would be helpful for you to spell out that they are specifically *special ed or therapeutic day* schools. We're not sending our kids to North Shore Country Day or Baker or something. D65 does not have a public therapeutic day school. (D202 does though). Also, none of the private therapeutic day schools are close to Evanston. My kid went to one in Highland Park (which has since closed). Along with the carpooling time, it was 40-50 minutes one way. And yes, some kids need an aide to keep them safe in the vehicle. Other schools are equally far or further (The O School is on the south side of Chicago, New Hope is in Arlington Heights). These schools have special ed teachers, therapeutic support onsite, group therapy, individual checkins, etc. to keep the kids safe, learning and healing.
How do you get an outplacement? Not without a fight basically. You have to get an IEP for your kid (months long process at minimum) and then advocate like crazy and get all sorts of assessments done to prove your kid's needs and sometimes resort to hiring at attorney ... and that's for those of us who have those privileges. Plus, the outplacement school has to have room to accept your kid and the appropriate resources. Trust me, you don't really have a lot of options of where to go.
With the assistance of groups like CASE, parents are learning more about their children's rights and how to get a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) as *required by law*. Believe me, all of us would love to have our kids in their neighborhood close to home. But as you illustrate above, D65 has failed in maintaining those programs that could have benefitted these kids. Families of kids with IEPs are not the problem. It doesn't matter why the number has gone up so much. We are *not the problem*. The system is.
I had a couple of thoughts after reading the documents. One of my first jobs in a school district was working with the special education transportation budget.
1. Bright Lift’s costs seem very reasonable for what they are doing. I do not know the state law in IL, but the state I worked in had very specific rules about transporting students to these programs that drove up the cost. For example, even if your student did not have physical disabilities or was capable of navigating a bus without an aide, the law required that you still provided vehicles with both if the purpose was to transport them to a special education program. I don’t think IL laws are that strict based on what I have read about CPS struggles lately, but if you are going to private contract it out, you get what they have and what their insurance requires. Even so, maintaining a set of special education vehicles in house may cost more.
2. It seems the reimbursement and volume of students are more the issue. On the volume, without more data, also hard to say why are more in private and if it is too much, aligned with Mara’s comment. It could be newer children to the district who can’t access the proper services and D.65 must send them elsewhere vs students whose services were changed. There are lots of articles about the repercussions of school closures and special education for the youngest children - delayed evaluations so developmental issues are harder to address as kids have aged, compensatory services, etc. The districts that were closed the longest have had the highest burdens, as have the affected students. Again, hard to know.
3. The district has also said McKinney Vento transportation costs have caused issues. Are they by a different vendor? I did not see them in the docs.