SEAC CIRCULAR
September 2004
1. The value of SEACs: PAAC (the Provincial Parent Association Advisory Committee on SEACs, of which LDAO is a member) has produced a document (below) outlining the role and value of SEACs and SEAC members. Please introduce this as an agenda item for discussion at a future SEAC meeting. PAAC would welcome your input on any changes that you feel should be made to the document and input on how the information was received by other Associations on your SEAC as well as staff support people. Please send input to: or mail to Joan Schiff, LDAO, 365 Bloor East, Box 39, Toronto, On M4W 3L4.
The Importance of Special Education Advisory Committees to Boards of Education
Special Education Advisory Committees ( SEACs) were introduced in Bill 82, the 1980 amendment to the Education Act, mandating special education service delivery to all exceptional students. They were piloted together with the rest of the legislation at 23 school boards. Since September, 1985, all school boards have had SEACs, as a standing committee of the school board. Throughout this period they have served as a valuable resource to school boards in meeting their legislative and accountability requirements for special education.
Initially, SEACs were established under Section 206 of the Education Act. In 1997, Bill 160 repealed that section of the Act. Instead Section 57.1 of the Education Act mandates the existence of SEACs, with Regulation 464/97 setting out the establishment, composition, practices, procedures, powers and duties of SEACs. The SEAC’s primary role is to make “recommendations to the board is respect of any matter affecting the establishment, development and delivery of special education programs and services for exceptional pupils of the board”. The regulation then goes on to say that the board, before making a decision on a recommendation from SEAC, shall provide an opportunity for the SEAC to be heard.
The board must also ensure that the SEAC participates in the board’s annual review of its special education plan. This latter requirement is more fully described in the document Standards for School Boards’ Special Education Plans (Ministry of Education, 2000). This document states that the board’s special education plan must describe how the board has included its SEAC in all phases of planning for special education services.
SEACs are legally entitled to review the financial statements and to participate in school boards’ annual budget processes. (Reg. 464 Section 12 subsection 3)
From information received by the Provincial Parent Associations’ Advisory Committee on SEAC’s (PAAC) from its SEAC reps., many boards overtly value the contributions of the knowledgeable volunteers who are represented on their SEAC. At the same time, other boards do not seem to place the same value on their SEACs, perhaps because trustees and even administrators do not understand why SEAC has been mandated to exist and they do not understand their own roles with respect to SEAC.
SEAC is a standing committee of the board. That means that it has to be established in accordance with the legislation. However, SEAC reps and school boards must understand that it does not exist to merely “rubberstamp” the decisions of the administration and the board. SEACs exist to provide input on the particular needs of each association’s exceptionality group, to bring valuable information from parents in their associations on the gaps in service being experienced by their children, to work together to ensure that the needs of all exceptional pupils are met and to advise the board on how the board’s special education programs and services need to be improved. It follows from the above that SEACs must act in a monitoring capacity, if they are to fulfilltheir legislated role. SEACs need timely access to information about budgets and expenditures. They are required toadvise the board when its special education programs and services do not meet the Ministry of Education’s legislative, policy and accountability requirements and/or do not meet the requirements of the Human Rights Code of Ontario for equal rights and opportunities for persons with disabilities.
It is worth noting that administrators attend SEAC meetings to support its effectivenessby providing SEAC with all the data and information it needs to be an informed advisory committee of board. They are not voting members of SEACs.
Boards should not view their SEACs as an adversary. SEAC input provides a set of standards and a vision toward which the board should be working in its special education programming and service development and delivery. Along with the school board’s other standing committees, SEAC should be reporting at every board meeting. The SEAC report should include the minutes of the last meeting, including any motions, policy recommendations, etc., made by the members of the SEAC. The report should also include the differing points of view expressed by SEAC members on various issues. All of this information will be useful to the board in making its decisions with regard to special education. It is the job of trustees to make informed decisions, ensure compliance with the board’s legislated mandate and to direct the administration where appropriate.
SEACs are a very important part of the board’s special education infrastructure and should expect to be respected and valued, as they fulfil their mandate as an advisory committee of the board.
PAAC 2004
2. SEAC Calendar revised:
Attached to this Circular is a revised version of the calendar sent to you with the last SEAC Circular. The revision was necessitated by the elimination of the ISA process. This calendar was produced by members of PAAC and will be kept updated as changes to Board reporting procedures are made by the Ministry.
3. The New IEP Resource Guide 2004: Available on the Ministry of Education website ( -the French language version is the same address except substitute fre for eng) is the revised IEP resource guide. This is enclosed with this mailing for our SEAC reps. who do not receive this Circular by email. The new guide is an improvement on its predecessor in that it reflects the IEP Standards and the review carried out by the Ministry across the province. It requires specific learning expectations that must be linked to the curriculum even for modified programs, and requires teachers to measure results. It also eliminates the clause in the previous document that said that “The IEP reflects the school board’s and the principal’s commitment to provide the special education program and services, within the resources available to the school board, needed to meet the identified strengths and needs of the student.”
Appendix B of the new guide contains samples of good IEPs.
SEACs should expect to receive ongoing updates from their Board on how it is meeting the expectations of the new guidelines for IEPs.
4. Responding to the recent funding announcements from the Ministry of Education: The members of the Special Education Advisory Committees have a significant role to play in school board accountability for the provision of special education programs and services to the exceptional students of the school board. In addition, given the increasing numbers of students who are not identified as exceptional but are receiving special education programming and have a written IEP, SEACs also have a similar mandate for the services and supports received by these students.
The SEAC mandate is set out in Regulation 464. It includes a specified role for reviewing the school board’s financial statements and for participating in the budget process. In spite of this, many SEACs are rather limited in how much influence they have on fiscal matters. On the other hand, when school boards, both the elected trustees and the senior administration, wish to complain about the funding of special education, some are prone to encourage or even pressure the SEAC to take a strong stance. This has certainly been the case in recent years about the provision of funds for ISA purposes, even though many of the Provincial parent associations on whose behalf the SEAC reps sit on the SEAC have opposed the ISA process and its detrimental impact on many exceptional students.
Those of you who are LDAO SEAC reps are well aware to what extent LDAO has been advocating for the elimination of the ISA process. Earlier this year you received a copy of the brief that LDAO submitted to the Ministry. This brief once again recommended that the Minister follow through on the statement that he had made both in opposition and shortly after being appointed Minister of Education about eliminating the ISA process. We also sent to you a shorter brief delineating LDAO’s response to the criticisms that had come our way in response to the funding brief.
LDAO is very pleased that the Minister, the Hon, Gerard Kennedy, announced that the ISA process will be replaced by an alternative process that will be more student-friendly or to use the Minister’s phrase, “less awfulized” than the ISA process. You, as SEAC reps, should also be pleased about this response. However, we are aware that there are many pressures on you by some of your school boards to object to this new direction and to join forces with the school boards and the trustees in complaining about the implications of this approach,
The purpose of this document is to give you an update about the facts, rather than the opinions of school boards, trustees and even LDAO. After all, it is not opinions that count ultimately in ensuring that all students receive appropriate special education programs and services and achieve to their full potential.
We are also providing you with some questions (you will see them in bold print below) that you will want to ask of your school board and discuss with the other members of your SEAC in order to get a clear understanding of what has happened in terms of funding and service provision in your jurisdiction.
In the last year of the previous government’s mandate school boards were provided with an additional $200 million for the purposes of ISA funding. This was followed by an allocation of $63 million, also for the ISA pot. This amount was calculated on the basis of the 2003/04 estimates that school boards submitted. On July 28th, the Assistant Deputy Minister for Funding announced that an additional $100 million will be allocated to school boards reflecting the ISA cycle 5 requests. (The memo announcing this funding is attached for your information.)
That means that in the last couple of years the total ISA allocation for ISA 2 and 3 increased by $363 million for a total allocation of $925.6 million dollars. Given that the Rozanski report recommended a total additional allocation of $250 million for special education purposes, not just ISA, you would think that this would have been viewed as a positive step by school boards.
But in fact the July 28th memo elicited a major negative response from some school boards and some of the professional organizations such as the Ontario Public School Boards Association. Many boards complained of the Ministry’s “clawback” activities. What was that about?
Where school boards do not spend all of their special education allocation on the provision of special education programs and services, they cannot transfer these amounts into general revenue. Instead, they are required to retain any unspent special education funds in a separate account. Until 2002/03 the accumulated surpluses at the total number of school boards only amounted to $9 million.
As a SEAC rep, do you know what was the surplus amount for your school board at the end of the 2001/02 fiscal year? If not, you should ask this at the next SEAC meeting and expect to receive an answer.
In 2002/03 this surplus holding increased to $85 million for the total number of school boards. It has been suggested that this was the result, at least in part, of the late arrival of the ISA funds in the 2002/03 school year. Other reasons were the school boards’ reaction to what they saw as previous under funding of special education and a reflection of how quickly they believed they could expand their programs.
Was your SEAC involved in these decisions about the retention of these funds in the board’s surplus account, rather than spending it on the provision of services and programs?
What was your school board’s surplus at the end of the 2002/03 school year? Was the SEAC involved in discussions about how these funds were to be spent?
What was your school board’s surplus at the end of the 2003/04 school year? Have you been told this? When the SEAC reviewed the year end financial statement and worked on the special education plan for 2004/05, what, if anything, did you decide about the short term and long term allocation of these funds?
The clawback that school boards are citing is the Ministry’s decision that where school boards have built up a significant surplus in their special education reserve only a small percentage of the funds are to be retained for the school board’s future activities, including unforeseen contingencies and year end variances. As a result, school boards were asked to submit their estimates for 2004/05 to the Ministry. If the school board had a small amount in the reserve fund, it will receive in full its estimated amount including the increase for Cycle 5 of the ISA amount. But for school boards that have significant amounts in their reserve funds, these amounts will be deducted from their 2004/05 allocation. In such instances, school boards are expected to utilize their reserve funds to supplement the Ministry allocation to cover their full special education costs.
What was your school board’s total budget for special education for 2004/05? Was this amount arrived in consultation with the SEAC? How much money will the school board receive from the Ministry for this year? Has the SEAC been notified that the difference will be fully covered by the reallocated reserve funds?
The Minister of Education is clearly very concerned, as are many parent organizations and LDAO in particular, that the tremendous increases in the number of students with ISA eligibility has not necessarily resulted in much better service provision for every one of these students with severe and acute needs. The number of students who qualified for such services increased to over 54,000 in 2003/04 from 27,785 in 2001/02. That has meant a doubling of the prevalence of incidence rates and took Ontario to the highest incidence rate for severe disabilities in Canada. In that same period the funding allocation for ISA purposes has almost doubled. But do we know what benefits accrued to the students from these funds?
As a SEAC, do you know what has happened to the increases in incidence rates at your school board? How do these compare with the Provincial rates? Who has been keeping track at your school board about the progress made by these students in response to the programming set out in their IEPs?
While this document is primarily focused on funding, it cannot ignore the issues that relate to academic progress by exceptional students. Our major concern about the ISA process has always been that in addition to the negative descriptors, it focused on qualifying a student for services but not necessarily ensured that they were served. The new government wants to change this situation.
Every SEAC is part of the solution. Over the next few months we shall be sending to you suggestions for how to enhance your school board’s accountability by focusing on student success and evaluating effectiveness.
In the meantime, LDAO will participate in the discussions that will result in the development of a new funding approach. We are aware that the Ministry is establishing an effectiveness and equity fund of over $50 million to assist those school boards that have met the Ministry’s accountability criteria, but face a real and demonstrated shortfall in responding to unmet needs.
The focus for all students including those who are receiving special education programs and services will be on educational achievement in line with the Provincial curriculum. As a SEAC rep, you need to know how your school board plans to enhance student achievement within the parameters of special education.
That way the SEAC can be a part of the solution.
5. The Rollout of the Web-Based Teaching Tool to School Boards:
On September 23, 2004 the Acting Deputy Minister, Judith Wright, sent a memorandum to all provincial Directors of Education, Secretary Treasurers of School Authorities and Directors of Provincial and Demonstration Schools. This memorandum announced the provision of the Web Based Teaching Tool (WBTT) to all elementary schools in the province, at no additional cost to the board. The WBTT provides the following resources for classroom teachers: