After looking at [Part 1] and [Part 2], we can consider a third case, where the kid who takes the EFA comes from a district that would be tuitioning him to a school outside the district, because the district doesn’t offer the grade that he’s in.
For example, suppose each district pays $15,000 to tuition a ninth-grader to a school (which could be public or private) in another district.
District 1 gives up $4000 in adequacy funding from the Trust Fund. District 2, which received no money from the Trust Fund, doesn’t give up anything.
Both districts save $15,000 in tuition costs. That’s a net savings of $11,000 for District 1, and $15,000 for District 2.
This means that in each case, the budget does actually get reduced. The decrease for tuition is more than the increase for the EFA, so total spending is reduced, and the taxpayers do save money.
We can consider special education spending as a special case of tuitioning when it involves an out-of-district placement. Although it’s not really ‘tuition’, the same analysis applies if the removal of the student allows the district to eliminate some special in-district spending (such as specialists or aides who were there to help only that student).
So if a student who transitions to an EFA was tuitioned, or required certain kinds of accommodations for special needs, that’s a win for taxpayers, although it’s relatively rare.
How rare? As we noted earlier, less than 30 percent of students who accept an EFA leave a public school in order to do so. So the number who give up town tuitioning must necessarily be smaller than that.
Currently about 6 percent of EFA students are categorized as having special needs, although there’s no way to know how many of those were already being home educated or enrolled in private schools.
