This piece was produced for the NEW News Lab, a local news collaboration in Northeast Wisconsin. Microsoft is providing financial support to the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation and Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region to fund the initiative.
For parents and teachers, raising and educating a special-needs child can be all-consuming. Parents struggle to care and advocate for their children, who may have significant health, educational and behavior challenges. And teachers face tough working conditions that prompt many of them to switch districts or leave special education, creating a shortage of qualified educators.
Federal and state mandates require that public school districts in Wisconsin provide all of the special education services a student needs. Roughly 14% of students in Wisconsin are classified as having special needs, which include physical, intellectual, cognitive, emotional and learning disabilities.
But over the past five decades, state funding support for special education has declined precipitously. That forces districts — which must abide by revenue caps set by the state — to take money from the regular education budget to pay for services they are legally obligated to provide to special ed students.
A customized collection of grant news from foundations and the federal government from around the Web.
Caroline Diehl is a serial social entrepreneur in the impact media space. She is Executive Chair and Founder of the UK’s only charitable and co-operatively owned national broadcast television channel Together TV, the leading broadcaster for social change runs a national TV channel in the UK and digital platform which helps people find inspiration to do good in their lives and communities.