Local Spec Ed Spending and Budget

[Laura]

How do I find or request the Special Education budget or spending for my school district?

I suspect my school district is diverting money towards legal fees, settlements, and administrative fees instead of special education services.  There were several OCR pending complaints from my school district about a month ago on the OCR website.  Now, they are gone and they are not listed in the OCR resolutions.  My thought is that the school district settled with the families involved.  I am aware of several families working with lawyers and I've heard from many families about their fight for services. I want to bring Special Education spending to the attention of the Board of Education.  There are no recent procedural complaints or due process complaints for my school district on my state website.  I find it hard to believe that no one has filed these types of complaints and is why I suspect the school district is settling instead of going to due process.  How can I verify that though?

I've had moderate success approaching an individual Board of Ed member in my school district.  I met with her one-on-one. I'm wondering if I should go to a Board of Ed meeting and share my experiences publicly. If I publicly share our experiences and concerns, is there any obligation by the BOE to address those concerns?

[Smiley74]

You do a Right to Know (FOIA request) for budget and spending. You can ask for whatever you want in financials. List of checks, invoices, spending and budget by line item (out of district tuition, legal fees, etc ) by month, etc. Names will be redacted on invoices. 
You can also do a RTK for the ODR cases that are no longer there and you’ll get a little bit of insight as to why in the list you get. I just received my response from this request last week—

You requested records relating to OCR complaints filed for the following school districts  including the name of the recipient; the date complaint was filed; the type of discrimination included in the complaint; the date the complaint was resolved, withdrawn, dismissed, or other; the basic reasons for OCR's decision; or other related information between 1/1/2005 and 3/30/2023.