SIERRA VISTA — Special-education students comprise 13 percent of the 6,168 enrollees in the city’s public schools.

These students currently consume about 30 percent of the instructional budget. While the number of special education students is increasing, finite resources are not.

The federal government provides the bulk of funding for special education, through what is known as a 220 Grant, said Rob Dillon, Sierra Vista public schools’ pupil personnel services director. He oversees special education, English language learning, gifted programs, nursing staff, psychologists, occupational and physical therapists and other staff.

Dillon presented the topic at Thursday’s meeting of the Financial Advisory Committee, which the governing board established in January to provide the public with greater transparency to the inner workings of the district’s $38.5 million annual budget.

For fiscal year 2008, which will end June 30, the Sierra Vista school district received $1,279,898.64 from the 220 Grant, Dillon said. This funding has plateaued for several years, and he said there is a growing gap between federal and state funding.

There were 770 special-education students last year. There are 820 this year. Most of those students — 550 of them — are classified as learning-disabled.

The operation of providing services for special-ed students is “quite expensive,” Dillon noted.

The 220 Grant mainly provides staffing for the school district, paying the salaries of 70 paraprofessionals who are serving in all nine of the Sierra Vista public school buildings.

The growing need for special education was illustrated by school board member Hal Thomas, who said 20 years ago autism was reported in one out of 1,000 children. Today that number is 1 in 150.

“That’s a pretty serious impact on a school system,” Thomas said.

Dillon added, “And we have to provide the resources that we can.”

Panel member John Skarhus, a local teacher and the representative of the Sierra Vista Education Association, said, “We have to deal with what is.”

Committee member Jacqueline O’Connor opened up a debate on the subject.

“I want to know where the money goes,” she said, “and I want to know what the money accomplishes. And if you tell me 30 percent of your budget goes to people who will never be — or probably most of them will never be — you know, a taxpaying individual, well I think we need to rethink that.”

She acknowledged that professionals such as Dillon must obey the dictates of the federal and state governments, “but I think those of us who are outside the system ought to be able to say, ‘Some of these things need to be changed …’ ”

Dillon responded, “I’ll take exception to that in this way. Most of those individuals will be taxpayers, because the largest group are those that fall in the area of learning disabilities.

“Most of those do make significant strides in their lives,” said Dillon, who has taught special-ed students in the classroom at all three levels. “… those folks are in the area of average intelligence … they certainly comprise the large majority of that group. So, most of the time, well above 90 percent, those folks are productive members of society.”

“So they’re not going to wash out of the system,” O’Connor said.

“No they’re not,” Dillon said. “And neither do we want them to.”

O’Connor continued, “But when we look at what we’re competing with around the world, our system is so broken, taking care of everybody who crawls up to the door, and, I’m sorry, there are choices that need to be made …”

Dillon said, “My job is to do the best we can with the resources we have, and I think that we do well in that way.”

He is proud of the fact that there is an increasingly smaller number of learning-disabled students who drop out of high school.

He reminded the committee that “when they leave, the funding leaves with them. That’s a significant cost to us.”

Not only are the drop-outs a moral and ethical quandary for the school district, but these students will still become a burden to taxpayers through the criminal-justice system and other areas if education fails.

The committee learned that special-education students carry a higher weighting factor in the Average Daily Membership, or ADM, which the Arizona Department of Education uses to formulate and distribute funding to school districts.

While a regular student might count as 1.0 in the ADM, a child with multiple disabilities might be weighted as much as 4.5, depending on the resources that are needed to educate the child.

District Business Manager Michelle Quiroz said the highest-weighted special-ed student is almost eight times the “normal” student.

“Gotta pour a lot of money on it,” Thomas said, regarding some of the special-education cases.

Later in the discussion, committee member Lee Knaeble shared a story about government mandates. He remembered attending a one-room schoolhouse in northern Minnesota during the 1940s, and when the government ordered hot lunches to be served, the school came up with the answer. In this particular part of the state, north of Bemidji, where temperatures can plunge to minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit, the old schoolhouse had a stove in one corner of the room. A large empty metal dish pan was set on the stove, and when students brought their lunches to school, they set them in the pan. Voila! Hot lunches were served, Knaeble said.

herald/review City Editor Ted Morris can be reached at 515-4614 or by e-mail at cityeditor@svherald.com.