15-774. Extraordinary special education needs fund; claim application; criteria; revisions; policies and procedures; annual report
A. The extraordinary special education needs fund is established consisting of legislative appropriations, gifts, grants and donations. Monies in the fund are continuously appropriated and are exempt from the provisions of section 35-190 relating to lapsing of appropriations. The department of education shall administer the fund. The department may retain up to two percent of the monies in the fund for the purposes of administering the fund.
B. The department of education shall award monies from the fund to school districts and charter schools with eligible claims. A school district or charter school is eligible to receive monies from the fund if the school district or charter school demonstrates to the department that a student receiving special education services has incurred costs in the current year of at least the statewide per pupil funding average multiplied by three.
C. A school district or charter school may apply to the department of education for an extraordinary special education needs claim from the fund. The department of education shall prescribe the format of the application, which shall do all of the following:
1. Demonstrate extraordinary needs, including describing and documenting student services required and showing that the district or charter school is not able to absorb the costs of these services.
2. Demonstrate total costs incurred in the current year by the student for whom the school district or charter school is applying. A school district or charter school may submit a claim for up to the full fiscal year if the expense incurred at the time of filing will continue to be incurred in subsequent quarters until the end of the same fiscal year. Total costs submitted shall be itemized and attributable to the student for whom the claim is being submitted. A school district or charter school may submit a claim for expenses incurred as a result of an independent educational evaluation.
3. Evidence that before applying for monies from the fund the school district or charter school made sufficient efforts to seek but has not received funding to cover the costs of extraordinary needs applied for pursuant to paragraph 1 of this subsection from all other sources, including federal and other state sources of funding.
D. The department of education shall evaluate claim requests on a quarterly basis. If there are insufficient monies in the fund to fund all eligible claims within a given quarter, the department shall prioritize funding based on the difference in the claim amount submitted by the school district or charter school and the total funding the school district or charter school has received for that student. If a school district or charter school submits a claim with insufficient information, the department may notify the school district or charter school to revise its claim within two weeks.
E. If a school district or charter school incurs an additional expense for a student who received funding for a claim from the fund in the same fiscal year, the school district or charter school may revise the claim and may receive funding at the end of the quarter in which the claim is submitted, subject to available monies in the fund. The department shall prioritize revisions in the same manner as other claims pursuant to subsection D of this section.
F. The department of education shall annually adopt policies and procedures for the fund and post the policies and procedures on the department's website. The policies and procedures must include the average statewide per pupil funding amount for that fiscal year that will be used in the calculation prescribed in subsection B of this section.
G. On or before December 15 of each year, the department of education shall submit a report that outlines all of the following to the governor, the president of the senate, the speaker of the house of representatives, the joint legislative budget committee and the governor's office of strategic planning and budgeting and provide a copy of this report to the secretary of state:
1. The number of extraordinary special education needs claims that were funded in the previous year.
2. How school districts and charter schools used claim monies.
3. The total number of claims received in the previous year.