BILL ANALYSIS Ó
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|SENATE RULES COMMITTEE | SB 884|
|Office of Senate Floor Analyses | |
|(916) 651-1520 Fax: (916) | |
|327-4478 | |
-----------------------------------------------------------------
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Bill No: SB 884
Author: Beall (D)
Amended: 8/1/16
Vote: 21
SENATE EDUCATION COMMITTEE: 9-0, 4/6/16
AYES: Liu, Block, Hancock, Huff, Leyva, Mendoza, Monning, Pan,
Vidak
SENATE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE: 7-0, 5/27/16
AYES: Lara, Bates, Beall, Hill, McGuire, Mendoza, Nielsen
SENATE FLOOR: 39-0, 6/2/16
AYES: Allen, Anderson, Bates, Beall, Berryhill, Block,
Cannella, De León, Fuller, Gaines, Galgiani, Glazer, Hall,
Hancock, Hernandez, Hertzberg, Hill, Hueso, Huff, Jackson,
Lara, Leno, Leyva, Liu, McGuire, Mendoza, Mitchell, Monning,
Moorlach, Morrell, Nguyen, Nielsen, Pan, Pavley, Roth, Stone,
Vidak, Wieckowski, Wolk
NO VOTE RECORDED: Runner
ASSEMBLY FLOOR: 77-0, 8/18/16 - See last page for vote
SUBJECT: Special education: mental health services
SOURCE: Author
DIGEST: This bill requires that funding for mental health
services for students with individualized education programs
(IEPs) be subject to existing state and federal audit
requirements, requires the California Department of Education
(CDE) to create a report on its compliance findings and
corrective action plans related to the provision of mental
SB 884
Page 2
health services for students, requires the CDE to create a
report on pupil outcomes for students receiving mental health
services, and requires the CDE to include a link to information
on family empowerment centers on its sample procedural
safeguards.
Assembly Amendments delete the contents of the bill; provide
that specified funding for mental health services be subject to
existing state and federal audit requirements; require the audit
guide to include an audit procedure to review whether specified
funding was used for its intended purpose; require the
Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) to ensure that the
local educational agency (LEA) has either corrected or developed
a plan of correction; require the CDE to include on its Web site
a link on the sample procedural safeguards to a list of family
empowerment centers; require the CDE to create a report on its
compliance findings and corrective action plans; and, require
the CDE to create a report on student outcomes, as specified.
ANALYSIS: Existing federal and state law provides that every
individual with exceptional needs who is eligible to receive
special education instruction and related services shall receive
that instruction and those services through a free appropriate
public education in the least restrictive environment. (United
States Code, Title 20, § 1412; Code of Federal Regulations,
Title 34, § 300.101 and § 300.114; Education Code § 56040 and §
56040.1)
Existing federal law provides that related services means
transportation, and developmental, corrective, and other
supportive services (including speech-language pathology and
audiology services, interpreting services, psychological
services, physical and occupational therapy, recreation,
including therapeutic recreation, social work services, school
nurse services designed to enable a child with a disability to
receive a free appropriate public education as described in the
IEP of the child, counseling services, including rehabilitation
counseling, orientation and mobility services, and medical
services, except that such medical services shall be for
SB 884
Page 3
diagnostic and evaluation purposes only) as may be required to
assist a child with a disability to benefit from special
education, and includes early identification and assessment of
disabling conditions in children. (United States Code, Title 20
§ 1401(26); Code of Federal Regulations, Title 34 § 300.34)
Existing state law:
1)Requires the SPI to ensure that student and program
performance results are monitored at the state and local
levels by evaluating student performance against key
performance indicators.
2)Requires the SPI, as part of state monitoring and enforcement,
to use quantifiable indicators, and qualitative indicators as
needed, to adequately measure performance in the indicators
established by the United States Secretary of Education in
specified priority areas. (EC § 56600.6)
This bill:
1)Requires funding for mental health services for students with
an IEP to be subject to existing state and federal audit
requirements, and requires audit procedures be included in the
audit guide to review whether this funding was used for its
intended purposes in the 2016-17 fiscal year.
2)Requires these audit procedures to be included in future
fiscal years if the addition of these procedures is
recommended by the State Controller.
3)Requires the SPI, if any mental health audit findings are
generated through this process, to ensure that the LEA has
either corrected or developed a plan of correction for state
SB 884
Page 4
and federal mental health funds.
4)Requires the CDE to create a report on its compliance findings
and corrective action plans related to the provision of mental
health services for students with an IEP using data the CDE
collects through its verification and comprehensive reviews,
including those targeted and any randomly chosen for review.
This bill requires the CDE to provide this report to the
appropriate fiscal and policy committees of the Legislature by
June 30, 2017.
5)Requires the CDE to create a report on student outcomes for
students receiving mental health services through an IEP using
data already maintained by the CDE. This bill requires the
outcomes to include all of the following:
a) Graduation rates.
b) Dropout rates.
c) Statewide assessment results.
d) Suspension and expulsion rates.
e) Participation in general education classes.
f) Post-school outcomes.
SB 884
Page 5
6)Requires the CDE to provide the report described in 5) above
to the appropriate fiscal and policy committees of the
Legislature by June 30, 2017.
7)Requires the CDE to include a link on the sample procedural
safeguards form maintained on its Web site to the page on its
Web site that lists family empowerment centers, and to include
this link on all sample procedural safeguard forms for which
it maintains translations.
Comments
Recent state audit. AB 114 (Committee on Budget, Chapter 43,
Statutes of 2011) transferred funding and responsibility for
providing mental health services for students with IEPs from
county mental health departments to LEAs.
In January, 2016, the Bureau of State Audits released a report,
requested by the author and other members of the Legislature, on
the effect of AB 114 on mental health services for students.
The report, titled Student Mental Health Services: Some
Students' Services Were Affected by a New State Law, and the
State Needs to Analyze Student Outcomes and Track Service Costs,
found that:
1)The most commonly offered types of mental health services and
the providers of those services generally did not change.
2)The number of students who received these mental health
services remained steady or grew.
3)The provider of the most common mental health services
generally had already been, and continued to be, the LEA.
SB 884
Page 6
4)The majority of changes to services were unrelated to AB 114.
The audit also found that for individual student records
reviewed:
1)Although the most common types of mental health services
offered and the service providers generally did not change,
LEAs removed mental health services from student IEPs in the
two years after AB 114 took effect.
2)Although most service reductions were not related to AB 114,
such as those prompted by a student graduating, IEP teams did
not always record in the IEP document their rationale of why a
service was removed.
3)For 40% of the students who had a change to their mental
health services or their educational placement within two
years of AB 114's implementation, the IEP teams did not
document the rationale for the changes.
4)For 13 of the 44 students reviewed who had a mental health
service removed from their IEPs, either the LEAs could not
satisfactorily explain why the services were removed or the
removal was related to AB 114. In three cases, the LEA had no
assurance that removing services would not adversely affect
access to education.
Audit recommendations regarding data collection and monitoring.
The audit made several recommendations related to data
collection and monitoring of student mental health services:
1)Require LEAs to use six performance indicators to perform
analysis annually on the subset of students receiving mental
health services.
2)Require CDE to analyze and report on the outcomes for students
SB 884
Page 7
receiving mental health services, including outcomes across
six performance indicators, in order to demonstrate whether
those services are effective.
3)Require CDE to collect information about the frequency of the
provision of each service contained in all students' IEPs.
4)Require CDE to annually review the frequency of mental health
services and follow up with Special Education Local Plan Areas
when it observes a significant reduction in the frequency of
services.
5)Require CDE to develop, and require all LEAs to follow, an
accounting methodology to track and report expenditures
related to special education mental health services.
This bill includes some, but not all, of the recommendations in
the audit, and also includes requirements that were not
recommended by the audit.
K-12 Audit Guide process. Existing law requires the State
Controller's Office, the Department of Finance, the CDE, and
certain education stakeholders to propose the content of the
K-12 audit guide for annual financial and compliance audits of
school districts, county offices of education, and other local
education agencies. This bill deviates from the existing
process and requires specific procedures to be included in the
guide for the 2016-17 fiscal year only. Procedures for the
review of mental health expenditures, as specified, could be
included in future years but only upon the recommendation of the
Controller.
FISCAL EFFECT: Appropriation: No Fiscal
Com.:YesLocal: No
According to the Assembly Appropriations Committee:
SB 884
Page 8
1)Minor/absorbable costs to the Controller's Office to add an
additional item to the annual K-12 audit guide.
2)Minor General Fund administrative costs to CDE of
approximately $10,000 to $20,000 to report on compliance
findings and corrective action plans and to report on pupil
outcomes, as specified, since reports are based on existing
data.
SUPPORT: (Verified8/19/16)
None received
OPPOSITION: (Verified8/19/16)
None received
ASSEMBLY FLOOR: 77-0, 8/18/16
AYES: Achadjian, Alejo, Travis Allen, Arambula, Atkins, Baker,
Bigelow, Bloom, Bonilla, Bonta, Brough, Brown, Burke,
Calderon, Campos, Chang, Chau, Chávez, Chiu, Chu, Cooley,
Cooper, Dababneh, Dahle, Daly, Dodd, Frazier, Beth Gaines,
Gallagher, Cristina Garcia, Eduardo Garcia, Gatto, Gipson,
Gomez, Gonzalez, Gordon, Gray, Grove, Hadley, Harper, Holden,
Irwin, Jones, Jones-Sawyer, Kim, Lackey, Levine, Linder,
Lopez, Low, Maienschein, Mathis, Mayes, McCarty, Medina,
Melendez, Mullin, Nazarian, Obernolte, O'Donnell, Olsen,
Quirk, Ridley-Thomas, Rodriguez, Salas, Santiago, Steinorth,
Mark Stone, Thurmond, Ting, Wagner, Waldron, Weber, Wilk,
Williams, Wood, Rendon
NO VOTE RECORDED: Eggman, Roger Hernández, Patterson
SB 884
Page 9
Prepared by:Lynn Lorber / ED. / (916) 651-4105
8/19/16 18:19:39
**** END ****