“Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to get essential news about NYC’s public schools delivered to your inbox. As Mayor Zohran Mamdani scrambles to plug a multi-billion dollar budget gap, his administration is looking more closely at the money New York City spends on private school tuition for students with disabilities. The payments — which topped $723 million last school year, up more than 300% from a decade earlier, according to the Independent Budget Office — have long generated intense debate about which families are benefitting. Now, according to data the Education Department previously declined to share , officials have revealed a staggering inequity: The vast majority of students who have access to that money are white. Families may receive funding for private school tuition after going through a legal process to show their children can’t be adequately served in the public school system. Nearly 71% of students who won tuition payments last school year were white, a population that makes up 12.5% of students with disabilities in the city’s public schools, according to Education Department data that the City Council pushed the agency to disclose last year. Black and Latino children, who make up about 75% of students with disabilities, represented just 24% of children receiving tuition reimbursements. (About 1 in 5 families did not disclose their race.) The families who benefit from those tuition payments are also much more likely to live in wealthier zip codes , the data confirms. The statistics may add fuel to the debate about how to make the special education system fairer and rein in growing costs, an issue that has drawn scrutiny in recent months. Many families say the tuition payments are a lifeline, helping them secure specialized instruction they couldn’t otherwise get in the public system. Last school year, the city made tuition payments on behalf of nearly 7,600 students, which cost roughly $100,000 per child on average, city officials said. Those students have disabilities that range from dyslexia to more complex challenges. About one-third of students who benefit from tuition payments have autism; their tuition costs are about $144,000 a year on average, officials said. Families of color and those who live in higher-poverty neighborhoods are often shut out of the reimbursement process. Caregivers may not know they are eligible for private placements funded by the city, have legal help to file the necessary claim, or secure outside evaluations to bolster their case for a private school placement. “The people who have the resources can afford better representation and have better opportunities to engage the legal system,” said Nelson Mar, an attorney at Bronx Legal Services, which handles special education cases for low-income families. “This is what plays out in the legal system in America.” Private schools often expect families to pay for some tuition costs up front while their legal claim plays out, a strain even on more affluent households. Those are known as “Carter cases” named for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that affirmed the right to those payments. Low-income families can request that the payments go directly to the private school without the family paying up front, which are known as “Connors cases.” But those opportunities can be limited because “there’s only a few schools that are willing to really take on that type of risk,” Mar said, noting the family may not end up winning their legal case for payments. In addition to those tuition cases, state law also requires the city to pay for services such as speech therapy and tutoring for students who attend private schools and never considered a public school. Those families aren’t eligible for tuition payments and are excluded from the racial demographic data in this story. Including the payments for those services, which officials said costs roughly $400 million, the city now pays well over $1 billion a year on tuition and services for students in private schools — roughly $1 in every $40 dollars of the Education Department’s budget. The city is attempting to tackle the rising cost of services for students in private schools who aren’t seeking tuition payments in part by instituting “fraud controls” to deal with providers who have reportedly billed for services that were unnecessary or weren’t delivered , said Liz Vladeck, the Education Department’s top lawyer. (Many of those services are provided in neighborhoods with large Orthodox Jewish populations where many students attend yeshivas .) Budget crunch prompts renewed debate about private school payments The exponentially rising cost of private school special education has attracted attention from City Hall as Mamdani scrambles to fill a projected $5.4 billion gap in the city’s budget . In a bid to secure more funding from the state to help ease the deficit, city officials have floated private school payments as a potential area for savings, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul confirmed. Vladeck declined to comment on the specifics of those negotiations in an interview with Chalkbeat, but said she is troubled by the racial inequities and growing costs. “I see it as an urgent problem,” she said, “that’s very challenging for policymakers to get their arms around because it is complicated.” City officials say they can save money by educating a greater share of students in private placements in the city’s public schools, a promise officials across multiple administrations have made even as tuition costs have continued to grow. “It used to be a fair critique that special education programs and services in New York City public schools were spotty,” Vladeck said. But she stressed that the city’s compliance with students’ special education learning plans has improved, and the Education Department has incrementally expanded programs for students with disabilities, including those with autism . The city is also overhauling literacy instruction , including for struggling readers . Vladeck contends the city’s programs can cost dramatically less than what private programs charge and that private schools generally don’t share achievement data, making it difficult to know if they are more effective. Will the Mamdani administration take action? It remains to be seen how Mamdani will approach the issue and past mayors have taken radically divergent approaches. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg hired an army of lawyers to fight tuition reimbursement requests , which are adjudicated by administrative judges. The goal was to avoid unnecessary placements and plow more money into the public school system as a whole, but the strategy drew criticism from parents and advocates. His successor, Bill de Blasio, took a less aggressive stance. In response to pressure from lawmakers, he made it easier for parents to seek reimbursement from the city in part by settling cases and not fighting families over the same school placements year after year. He framed the effort as a matter of equity for parents who may not have the resources to repeatedly mount aggressive legal cases. “That was well intentioned, but it had some pretty damning consequences,” Vladeck said at a City Council hearing in March. In the years that followed, the number of special education complaints seeking payments for tuition, services, and other special education requests grew significantly and costs exploded . A February report from the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute argued the reimbursement system is “financially unsustainable” and urged rolling back some of the de Blasio-era reforms, among other changes. But not everyone is convinced that bringing more students with disabilities into the school system would be less expensive without reducing the level of services students get in private programs. “I really disagree when people say that this is an unreasonable cost for the DOE to bear,” Mar said of the Education Department spending on private school tuition. His clients who have private tuition paid by the city have generally made “significant growth.” Mar said a more equitable system would be less adversarial, noting the city often fights cases even when it’s clear the student isn’t receiving the help they need. Brooklyn mom Dolores Swirin-Yao said she would have preferred to keep her son Jeremy, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and learning disabilities including dyslexia, in the public school system. When it became clear his public school wasn’t successfully teaching him to read, she felt she had no choice but to consider a private placement and file a legal claim for reimbursement. “People say that this is a way for people to game the system and get their kids in private school,” Swirin-Yao said. But her son’s public school “seemed to believe that he would never read.” Without that skill, she worried he would end up on public assistance. Swirin-Yao hired a lawyer and fronted tuition payments, straining to take on $125,000 in debt while waiting for the Education Department to reimburse her. She recognized she still had a leg up: access to credit, the ability to make phone calls during the work day, or take leave to attend a legal hearing. Though her son is Black, Swirin-Yao felt she benefited from being middle class and white. Jeremy ultimately learned how to read. He graduated from The Aaron School in 2024. Despite the stress and strain of paying tuition up front, it was “the best investment I ever made,” Swirin-Yao said. “My child was able to graduate from high school, go to culinary school, can work in this field, and has a future.” Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org .
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