CONTEXT: Decentralization hinders support 

Students with disabilities in New Orleans have not had education programs that promote their highest potential: A “D” academic performance rating and scores sitting 10% lower than the Louisiana average for their peers suggest abundant opportunity to make change and improve outcomes.  

The decentralized school system in New Orleans poses challenges for individual charter LEAs, including many single site schools, which must independently manage all aspects of special education. Autonomy in staffing, student enrollment, compliance, and funding create complexities in delivering consistent and effective services across the city.  As such, school system leaders sought to make substantive and financially sustainable improvements to the accessibility, coordination, and delivery of student services. 

An Educational Service Agency (ESA) offers a collaborative solution to address the challenges of New Orleans’ decentralization and provide for the diverse needs of students with disabilities. By creating a nexus of support and resource coordination, ESAs can enhance service delivery and ensure every New Orleans student has what they need to succeed.  

Afton Partners collaborated with New Orleans Public Schools (NOLA PS), The Center for Learner Equity, and Trepwise to explore the creation and sustainability of an ESA by designing a financial model. 

GOALS: Redesign special education service delivery to improve outcomes in a financially informed way 

Our contributions to the work at hand sought to accomplish two goals: 

• Develop a comprehensive financial model for an Educational Services Agency in New Orleans Public Schools (NOLA PS). 

• Determine the revenue, cost, and philanthropic need implications of different operational scenarios and policy decisions for the future ESA by delivering dynamic, detailed financial projections. 

The financial model and its outputs provided critical insights for the system of schools, ensuring sustained enhancements to their special education services.  

APPROACH:  Develop service design principles to guide decision-making  

Afton created a model that enabled the collective team to vet a variety of special education service design options according to their feasibility and sustainability.  We started by proposing five key design principles to guide the development of the financial model and lay the foundation for decision making throughout the process. 

Afton combined data and input from schools that deliver services with information on student needs. Using student-specific services information from IEPs would’ve offered ideal and accurate data. However, legally protected student confidentiality and wide variations in service plans, providers, documentation protocols, and service-related language would make it difficult to analyze or identify meaningful patterns. 

Given those limitations, the project team came up with a creative approach to accurately assess service needs: we used data regarding the distribution and types of disabilities and matched them to potential services and programs that would most likely be needed for each respective disability. We then synthesized those composites with insights from charter schools regarding where their students experience gaps in services.  

For example, a school may not have enough speech therapists to meet the needs of students with disabilities who require speech support. The model allowed us to answer the question: how would providing those services in a centralized, shared network affect sustainability?  

Looking at the system, student needs, and gaps as a whole, we used insight from prospective participant charter schools to understand what services they struggle to provide. Given that more participation would mean a more robust and sustainable service agency, we also sought to understand which services, if available as a shared resource, would motivate charter schools to participate in the ESA.  

OUTCOMES and IMPACT: A financially informed blueprint for better special education services 

We ran four distinct scenarios, which served as illustrative examples that demonstrated how various combinations of assumptions influence both the level of services provided and the financial sustainability of the ESA. The model iterations and final outputs provided several key insights that acted as both a green light and a guide for the ESA design and implementation.  

NOLA PS now has a blueprint for action that they can pursue with confidence.  With model-informed implementation, students with disabilities stand to receive adequate, coordinated services in a way that does not overburden individual schools but instead builds a larger and more efficient ecosystem of support for educators, students, and families.  

Beyond NOLA PS, the approach to the work at hand offers an adaptable and creative avenue for exploring special education system redesign through a financially informed lens. While the particular use in this case was to inform the creation of an educational service agency, it offers fully customizable applicability to a broad range of special education service design inquiries.