Special Education Enrollment Is Exploding Everywhere – It’s Plummeting at Del Mar Union 70%
By Jakob McWhinney88%
7/22/2026, 9:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Appeal to Emotion, and Confirmation Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 24.6% saturation with 534 hits. Analysis detected 3,177 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,168 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 63.1% and a BS Rank of 70% (6,136 of 19,908 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 69.20% of the article peer group.
Del Mar Union Elementary School District’s special education program has long been the subject of controversy.
While students have always excelled academically, over the years, legal claims to secure services, lawsuits and complaints to government oversight agencies have piled up.
The disputes have become so heated that the district has at times temporarily banned families from stepping foot on campus.
And it’s not just outsiders who’ve raised alarms.
The district’s special education program drove a then-sitting school board member to file a legal claim to secure services for their child.
The parents, activists and lawyers who’ve duked it out with Del Mar say the district has seemed openly aggressive to families seeking special education services.
Local activist Janice Holowka said the posture has left parents feeling like they have few choices.
“Parents have to sue them in order to get supports and services for their kids,” Holowka said.
“Many families would rather leave the district than fight with them.”
Over that same period, Del Mar’s special education figures have become something of an anomaly.
Statewide, the number of kids with disabilities has exploded, rocketing up by more than 25 percent over the past decade.
But at Del Mar, the figure plummeted.
Since 2015, the number of students with disabilities has nearly been cut in half – the largest decrease of any district in California with at least 100 students with disabilities.
District leaders say the massive drop is a function of overall enrollment decline, a trend that’s swept across California school districts.
The way they see it, they have fewer students overall, so it makes sense the number of kids with disabilities has dropped.
But even taking overall enrollment decline into account, Del Mar’s figures are disproportionate.
Exactly what’s driving the stark decline isn’t clear, but for stakeholders who’ve sparred with the district, the data point feels like a confirmation that Del Mar makes it uniquely difficult for families seeking special education services.
A Statewide Standout
To say the decline in the number of students with disabilities at Del Mar is striking would be an understatement.
Schools across California have seen ever-increasing numbers of kids with disabilities for a whole lot of complicated reasons.
Those significant increases have left districts on the hook to pay for costly special education services for increasing numbers of kids.
The price of those services has blown massive holes in the budgets of many districts, which often have to foot the bill with general fund money because of inadequate state and federal funding.
But at Del Mar, the number has declined by 43 percent over the past decade.
Of the nearly 550 California districts with at least 100 students with disabilities, Del Mar’s decline is the largest.
To Leslie Montoro, Del Mar’s executive director or student services, the district’s enrollment decline is playing a key role.
Del Mar, like most districts in California, has been hit by a wave of enrollment decline over the past decade.
Since 2015, Del Mar’s enrollment has declined by about 23 percent.
The district’s rate of decline is well above the statewide average, but dozens of districts have seen greater declines in enrollment without matching the decline in the number of kids with disabilities attending Del Mar schools.
Take local district South Bay Union.
Over the past decade, the district has lost about 40 percent of its students.
Meanwhile, the number of kids with disabilities has shot up by 28 percent.
Where Del Mar also stands out is the percentage of its students who have disabilities.
For many districts, the share of students with disabilities has risen considerably over the past decade.
That’s because while districts’ overall enrollment has shrunk, the number of students with disabilities they serve has risen.
Among comparable districts, their share of students with disabilities has increased by four percent.
At Del Mar, the share has decreased by four percent.
Only 15 comparable districts statewide have seen their percentage of students with disabilities decrease.
Del Mar’s decrease is the largest.
Those declines didn’t seem to concern, Montoro, though.
She wrote that the district measures its success not by how many students are taking part in its special education program, but by whether they’re getting what they need to be successful.
And by all measures students with disabilities at Del Mar seem to be doing great.
They far outperform those of other districts she pointed out, and the program’s top administrator even recently took home an award celebrating her work.
“We have continued to strengthen our instructional model and early intervention systems so that students receive timely support within general education whenever appropriate,” Montoro wrote in an email.
Beyond the striking statistics, Del Mar’s special education program has for years been the subject of skirmishes.
In 2022, parents went public with claims that the district was not only denying services to kids, but also attempting to silence parents when they spoke out .
Disputes about what services, if any, kids may need are common.
In fact, some district leaders have said they worry they’re overidentifying students, meaning they’re identifying nondisabled students as having disabilities.
In an email, Montoro wrote that “the Del Mar Union School District is deeply committed to ensuring that every student receives the educational opportunities, supports, and services they need to learn, grow, and thrive.”
At the heart of many of the disputes is whether or not students qualify for special education services.
Under federal law, districts are required to assess every student educators suspect of having a disability.
Parents can also ask to have their children assessed, though.
Ultimately, it’s not at all uncommon for districts to find students ineligible for services, said Matt Storey, a special education attorney who over his 16-year has represented families in over 2,000 cases across the region.
Oftentimes, they’re correct to do so.
What’s more uncommon about Del Mar’s approach is how unwilling they seem to collaborate with parents, he said.
For example, when there’s a disagreement about services, parents are legally allowed to ask districts to pay for an independent education evaluation.
These evaluations are done by impartial state-licensed professionals and usually take the form of classroom observations, in-office evaluations and a series of tests.
Districts then have two options: pay up or file a due process complaint against a parent.
These are legal claims that can be filed by either a district or a parent meant as a last resort.
Barring a settlement, they end up being adjudicated before judges in the Office of Administrative Hearings.
The vast majority of due process complaints are filed by parents – about 90 percent in 2025.
While most districts agree to provide an independent evaluation, Storey said that in his experience, Del Mar Union is the only school district that regularly goes the due process route.
“Most districts would never take that step, because you’ve now just wasted money on attorneys and destroyed any relationship you could ever have with this family – you’re suing them about their child who has a disability,” Storey said.
“It’s the aggression that is striking and doesn’t make sense, because it does not – it cannot – produce good results.”
In 2025, at least 13 due process claims involving Del Mar Union were filed, according to data from OAH.
Settlement agreements obtained by Voice of San Diego show at least four of those claims were filed by Del Mar against parents.
The number of total claims is about five times higher than statewide per pupil rates, while the number of claims filed by Del Mar against parents is about 12 times higher than statewide rates.
In some instances, the district has done neither.
In 2023, Storey helped file a complaint against Del Mar for denying families independent educational evaluations, which spurred an investigation by the California Department of Education.
The department ultimately found the district was out of compliance with federal laws governing special education that required districts provide such evaluations.
In an email, Montoro wrote that “when disagreements arise regarding a student’s educational program, the district follows the dispute resolution procedures established under state and federal law and remains committed to working collaboratively with families in the best interests of students.”
A handful of complaints have escalated into more traditional lawsuits.
Last year, parents sued alleging the district was abusing their disabled child by routinely placing them in an isolated room called a “reset room” in response to behavior issues.
The lawsuit came after a Title IX investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights into the claims stalled out due to sweeing cutbacks at the Department of Education .
The status of that open case has not been updated in more than a year and a half.
Tensions have also boiled over in other ways.
During the 2025 school year, Del Mar issued at least three stay away notices to family members of students with whom tensions had boiled over.
These notices are, in essence, temporary restraining orders barring the recipient from entering school premises for a set time period.
In all instances, district officials detailed incidents in which they claimed parents acted in hostile or threatening ways toward staff.
To Storey, what he views as a hardball approach feels like a percentage game.
Say the districts denies services to 10 families, he said, maybe only two will question the decision.
From there, the district may file due process claims against those two, only one of whom will actually hire a lawyer to push back.
In this way, the district may functionally reduce the number of kids who end up with services, Storey posited.
Montoro wrote in an email that the district’s special education assessments are always comprehensive and meet all federal and state requirements.
“When students meet eligibility criteria, they receive the services and supports necessary to ensure a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment,” she wrote.
But even some district leaders have found Del Mar’s special education difficult to navigate.
Stephen Cochrane is a professor of special education at Alliant University who was elected to Del Mar’s board in 2017.
He resigned in 2019 when he moved out of the district boundaries.
Cochrane said the huge drop surprised him.
He wasn’t sure exactly what could be causing it, but he’d long heard stories of families struggling to get services for their kids.
In fact, while on the board, Cochrane filed a due process claim for one of his children.
In his case, he felt like staff wasn’t listening to him and instead just doing whatever they wanted.
The blame for that, he said, rested with administrators.
“This isn’t specific to Del Mar, but in many school districts I see a general lack of accountability in administrators running the district,” Cochrane said.
“When there’s a lack of transparency and a lack of accountability, that is a perfect environment for all kinds of abuses.”
Special education teachers have also voiced concerns about Del Mar’s program.
In 2022, Del Mar’s teachers union conducted survey of all 40 of the district’s special education educators .
While the questions asked didn’t deal with how the district identified students with disabilities, the survey carried stark warnings about the program.
Nearly every single educator said the district’s special education program lacked transparency, educational integrity and instilled in them a fear of retaliation should they speak up.
Educators also raised alarms about feeling overworked and understaffed, leading to delays in processes with clear legal timelines, and what they viewed as a recent uptick in litigation.
Most worrying, however, was a nearly uniform endorsement of concerns the program was engaging in “unethical and illegal” practices.
Many of those practices centered around teams managing students’ individual education plans, legal documents that dictate what services students need.
Staff members said administrators were dictating to IEP teams what they could and could not say and what services they could offer students.
They also reported administrators instructing IEP team members to change students’ disability categories to ones they felt were inaccurate and school psychologists being told to “manipulate data and students’ needed level of support” after assessments had been completed.
“Special education staff are at a breaking point,” the letter read.
“The illegal and unethical directives need to stop and the people giving them need to be held accountable.
The integrity of DMUSDs special education programs has been compromised.”
In an email, Montoro wrote that she could not comment on the survey, but that the district is focused on the present.
“It is unfortunate that the focus remains on a 2022 survey rather than the district’s current work and continued progress.
We are proud of the comprehensive programs, services, and supports we provide to students, staff, and families, and we continually evaluate and strengthen our practices to ensure we are meeting the needs of every student,” Montoro wrote.
The post Special Education Enrollment Is Exploding Everywhere – It’s Plummeting at Del Mar Union appeared first on Voice of San Diego .
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.