Opinion: The other side of the AEA debate

After passionate testimony given last Wednesday before a subcommittee of the House Education Committee, HSB 542, the measure proposed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, appears dead on arrival. House Education Committee chair Rep Skyler Wheeler quietly announced on his personal Facebook page Thursday morning that the bill would not move forward in the House.

So, out of nowhere, the governor’s signature is dead on arrival. For now, at least.

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Under the governor’s revised proposal, Iowa school districts would no longer have been required to partner with AEAs and automatically pass their state and federal special education funding onto them to receive special education services. Certain non-special education-related products and services would have needed a school district’s request in order to be provided by an AEA, and others would have required approval from the state Department of Education, newly tasked with oversight in lieu of AEA governing boards.

Faced with a loss of revenue if school districts decide that their dollars are more efficiently spent elsewhere, AEAs pushed back, joined by scores of Iowa parents and educators who desire to leave the system unchanged. Clearly, their passionate testimony was heard.

But like it or not, there was — and still is — another side to this debate, a comparatively quiet one that knows that Iowa needs to make some improvements to its delivery of special education services. According to a report commissioned by the state last year and compiled by Guidehouse, Inc, those needed improvements can be realized through the restructuring of Iowa’s AEAs to move much of their focus away from instructional support and other services and return their core focus to their original purpose: services for students with disabilities.

Report shows Iowa behind other states, national average in special education

It isn’t necessarily surprising that numbers from the annual Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress (ISASP) show that Iowa students with disabilities have a significantly lower proficiency rate compared with the proficiency rate of all students. The numbers themselves, however, are a bit sobering. Out of all Iowa students, 70% were proficient in math in 2023. In English language arts (ELA,) 72 percent were proficient. But out of disabled students, only 29 percent were proficient in math. Only one out of every four Iowa students with disabilities were proficient in ELA.

Of course, there are caveats to those figures. Disabilities range in severity and quantity. It’s simply unrealistic to expect that every student with a disability will have a chance to achieve proficiency in both subjects. But many students with disabilities can — especially those who are able to spend all or most of their time in a regular classroom with special adaptations. Factoring in the large array of testing accommodations available to students with disabilities who take the ISASP (including read-aloud support, native language translation, printed multiplication tables and separate testing environments,) the disparity in proficiency rates does seem bigger than it should be.

A gap also exists between Iowa’s students with disabilities and those in other states. When reviewing scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (which also allows for testing accommodations for students with disabilities,) the Guidehouse report showed that Iowa students with disabilities in both 4th and 8th grades have scored below the national average for two decades, over which time both Republicans and Democrats have had full executive and legislative control during different periods. Though the last assessment in 2022 showed a rebound to just below the national average, Iowa still performs significantly below what the report calls “indicator states,” or six states with characteristics in the delivery of education services similar to Iowa’s.

It’s not flattering news. And however deeply unpopular the governor’s proposed plan was with those who desire to keep the current AEA structure in place, the news of our current standing in special education is enough to tell us that change needs to start somewhere. It’s worth examining a few things in the current AEA setup that aren’t as ideal as we once might have thought.

How are AEAs governed?

Current AEA governance is arguably not structured in an ideal way. If the key concern about the proposed restructuring is that doing so takes power away from “locally elected boards,” as the statewide website for AEAs put it, every Iowan should consider what “locally elected” means.

Atop the governing structure of AEAs is the board of the Iowa Association of Area Education Agencies, a “distinct legal entity,” as stated in its policy manual. Each of the state association’s nine board members are regional AEA board members elected by their respective agencies.

Each of Iowa’s nine AEAs, outlined by geographic regions based on population, has its own board of directors. Each AEA region is further divided into what is called “director districts,” and the board is comprised of one representative from each director district, elected by the boards of the local school districts within that director district.

Nope, “locally elected” AEA boards are no more elected by voters than appointees of the Iowa Department of Education, which would assume oversight of AEAs under the governor’s proposal. Currently, the only say voters actually get in the AEA leadership structure — mind you, these are taxpayer-funded institutions with significant decision-making authority — is by voting for members of their school boards every two years. The school boards then elect (or appoint) the AEA boards, who then elect (or appoint) the statewide governing board.

It reminds me of a line from a song from the modern-day recording ensemble AJR: It’s kinda funny how you vote for someone, to vote for someone, to vote for someone.

School boards don’t necessarily get equal say in who is picked to represent their district on an AEA board, either. Like many other political jurisdictions, AEA director districts are divided by population. In rural areas, one director district can include a double-digit number of school districts, while other director districts in more densely populated areas include just one school district. In the Heartland AEA region, which covers over a dozen counties including Polk, Dallas and Story, Director District 3 represents 17 different school districts. Des Moines Public Schools is too large of a school district to fit in one AEA director district, so it makes up the entirety of both Director Districts 7 and 8 and a portion of Director District 6. Therefore, DMPS gets to choose two of the Heartland AEA’s nine board members by itself — and weigh in on a third.

It's that way on all sides of the state. The Council Bluffs Community School District fills all of Director Districts 8 and 9 of the Green Hills AEA, plus parts of Director Districts 5 and 7. In the Keystone AEA, three board members — one third of the whole board — are chosen at the sole discretion of the Dubuque Community School District. The Dubuque school district also makes up almost 39% of a fourth Keystone AEA director district.

With at least the possibility of such lopsided representation, it becomes understandable that some school leaders don’t feel that the portion of their state and federal funding that they are required to pass on to the AEAs is coming back to them in the form of the services they feel are the appropriate fit for their districts.

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Some education leaders have expressed concerns with AEA funding structure

That includes Superintendent Corey Seymour of the Clear Creek-Amana School District, part of the Grant Wood AEA serving districts including Cedar Rapids, Linn-Mar and Iowa City. Each district is different, Seymour told legislators at a hearing on Wednesday at the state Capitol. For that reason, “ … schools should be able to control flow-through dollars.”

Okoboji Community Schools Superintendent Todd Abrahamson was even more frank, telling legislators, “We’ve already started to look at what we would do with the dollars … so we could meet the needs every day in our district, ‘cause those needs are not being met currently.”

Most telling, though, perhaps, is the fact that even some AEA employees are said to be in support of reforming their organizations. Earlier in January, State Sen. Ken Rozenboom of Oskaloosa, chair of the Senate Education Committee, shared parts of a letter he received in November 2023 along with Gov. Reynolds, the Department of Education, and one of Iowa’s nine AEAs — presumably the one to which the “concerned staff” were referring in their letter.

“We believe we would be better off consolidating our resources with another AEA,” read the excerpt of the letter, from which names and locations were redacted. “Our special needs population is growing and our people resources to deliver valuable services to students with special needs are shrinking. Yet our administrative resources continue to grow.”

Do these comments from district leaders and AEA staff mean that the concerns of the opposition should have been ignored if Reynolds and legislators were to push the bill forward in the House? No. But it indicates that there are two very real and very different sides to the debate.

Governor’s proposal DOA — for now

Changes to Iowa’s special education system have been sought for years. Until only days ago, I thought that this was the year some of those changes would be realized. It still could be, albeit in a different manner. As my editor says, nothing is ever totally dead until they adjourn for the year.

Even if they don’t happen this year, are future AEA changes dead forever? Don’t count the Big Kim Energy out. If we’ve learned one thing from last year’s passage of school choice, arguably her biggest policy win ever, it’s that Kim Reynolds isn’t afraid to abandon a sprint to take up a marathon.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com