Medicaid Money Goes Untapped By Many Schools

By Lisa Fine

Washington

Schools are missing out on what could be more than a billion dollars a year in Medicaid reimbursements for coordinating and providing medical services to special education students from low-income families, school advocates say.

Using a series of assumptions in the absence of hard data on the subject, those advocates estimate that if the nation's schools collected all the money they were entitled to, it would mean another $1.5 billion to $2.4 billion a year in funding. Instead, the money for those medical services comes from local and state school revenue, leaving less available for all other programs.

Fourteen years after federal law was changed to allow schools to collect Medicaid for serving needy special education students, only 44 percent of school districts are participating, according to a study released in March that was commissioned by...