Special education enrollment in Montana increases once again

The number of students in Montana with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) -— which includes students learning in special education environments and students in regular education with accommodations or modified curricula — increased by 2.1% between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years, marking another year in more than a decade of steady increase. 

IEPs cover a wide range of conditions, including autism, developmental delays, intellectual disabilities, speech or language impairments, hearing impairments, visual impairments, emotional disturbances and more. Special education administrators and advocates attribute the rise in IEPs to decreased stigmatization of learning disabilities and better identification by school districts.

“There’s been a concentrated effort from people in the disability world to say disability is not a dirty word,” said Rebecca Bogden-Richards, executive director of the Montana Empowerment Center, an organization which helps educate families through the IEP process.

Some administrators wonder if educational gaps caused by the Covid pandemic are leading more students to qualify for IEPs.

The state’s most recent data was presented to the Board of Public Education on Thursday by the Office of Public Instruction. The statewide trend follows a national trend, in which the number of students with IEPs reached a record-high during the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent year for which there

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