Higher Ground Academy - EdTribune MN - Minnesota Education Data

One in Five: Minnesota Nears a Special Education Threshold

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Minnesota 2025-26 Enrollment.

In 2014, roughly one in seven Minnesota students received special education services. In 2026, it is closer to one in five. The share has grown every year except 2021, when COVID disrupted identification processes statewide, and the pace has accelerated since.

The raw number, 168,525 students, is striking enough. What makes it structurally significant is what happened around it: total enrollment barely moved. Minnesota enrolled 850,871 students in 2014 and 873,175 in 2026, a gain of 2.6%. Special education enrollment grew 33.8% over the same period, adding 42,618 students. The students receiving specialized instruction are not arriving from outside the system. They were already there.

The climb toward 20%

Minnesota's special education rate rose from 14.8% in 2014 to 19.3% in 2026, an increase of 4.5 percentage points over 12 years. At the current pace of roughly 0.38 percentage points per year, the state is on track to cross 20% by 2028.

The growth has not been steady. Before the pandemic, special education enrollment climbed by 3,000 to 4,500 students per year. COVID disrupted that pattern: the state lost 3,420 special education students in 2021 as schools struggled to conduct evaluations and maintain services remotely. Then came the rebound. Between 2022 and 2024, Minnesota added 16,076 special education students in just three years, peaking at 7,517 new identifications in 2024 alone, the largest single-year gain in the dataset.

The 2025 and 2026 numbers, while still positive at 5,667 and 3,520 respectively, suggest the post-COVID identification backlog may be clearing. Whether the rate settles or continues climbing will shape the state's fiscal outlook for years.

What is driving the surge

The most likely explanation is expanded identification, not a sudden increase in disability prevalence. Three mechanisms are operating simultaneously.

First, diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder have broadened nationally. The CDC reported in April 2025 that 1 in 31 eight-year-olds now meets the autism identification threshold, and children born in 2018 were 1.7 times more likely to be diagnosed by age four than those born four years earlier. In Minnesota specifically, 1 in 34 children are diagnosed with autism. The Autism Society of America has emphasized that this reflects better identification, not a growing epidemic.

Second, COVID created a backlog. Evaluations stalled during remote learning, and referrals accumulated. When schools returned to in-person instruction, the evaluation pipeline surged, producing the 2023 and 2024 spikes visible in the data.

Third, parent awareness has increased. KAXE reported in September 2025 that approximately 150,000 Minnesota K-12 students now receive special education services, and attributed rising demand partly to greater awareness of neurological disorders.

A competing explanation, that Minnesota's schools are genuinely seeing more students with disabilities, cannot be ruled out entirely. But the consistency of the trend across states and the timing of the post-COVID acceleration both point toward identification-driven growth rather than prevalence-driven growth.

A widening gap between two enrollment lines

Indexing both series to 2014 reveals the structural divergence. By 2026, special education enrollment stands at 133.8 on the index while total enrollment sits at 102.6. The gap began opening around 2017 and widened sharply after the pandemic.

The practical consequence: non-special-education enrollment actually fell by 20,314 students between 2014 and 2026, even as total enrollment grew slightly. For every 100 students in general education, there are now 23.9 students receiving special education services, up from 17.4 in 2014. That ratio determines staffing models, classroom composition, and the size of the unfunded gap districts must cover from general revenue.

The cross-subsidy: Minnesota's billion-dollar structural problem

Special education services carry higher per-pupil instructional costs than general education. Federal law requires districts to provide these services regardless of funding levels. The gap between what districts spend on special education and what they receive from state and federal sources is called the cross-subsidy, and in Minnesota, it has been one of the largest unfunded mandates in K-12 education.

The Minnesota Department of Education projected the statewide cross-subsidy at $750 million for fiscal year 2024. Rep. Dan Wolgamott (DFL-St. Cloud) characterized the existing system as "robbing Peter to pay Paul," describing how special education shortfalls force districts to redirect general education resources.

"This is the right thing to do. These services are critical to our students with special needs to help them reach their fullest potential." — Rep. Dan Wolgamott, Minnesota House Session Daily

The legislature responded with the most significant special education funding increase in state history. The 2023 education law raised state coverage of the cross-subsidy from 6.43% to 44% for fiscal years 2024-2026, with a further increase to 50% beginning in fiscal year 2027. The law allocated $663 million in increased funding for the 2024-25 biennium.

But even 44% coverage leaves districts responsible for the majority of unreimbursed costs. And the denominator keeps growing: as the special education population expands, so does the total cost. The 2025 K-12 education bill directed a Blue Ribbon Commission to find $250 million in special education cost reductions by the 2026 legislative session and cut special education transportation reimbursement to 95% in fiscal year 2026 and 90% thereafter, a reduction of $43.2 million over two years.

Where the burden falls unevenly

Special education rates vary enormously across Minnesota's 535 districts. Excluding intermediate school districts, which are special education cooperatives by design, rates in 2026 range from 2.1% at Higher Ground Academy^↗, a charter school in St. Paul, to 31.2% at Cass Lake-Bena^↗ in northern Minnesota.

Among districts with at least 500 students, 126 have already crossed the 20% threshold. Rural districts dominate the high end: Deer River^↗ at 30.6%, Onamia^↗ at 29.8%, and Greenway^↗ at 29.5%. At those rates, nearly one in three students is entitled to an individualized education program.

The charter sector tells a different story. Charter schools collectively serve students at a 15.8% special education rate, compared to 19.6% for traditional districts, a 3.8 percentage-point gap. Both rates have grown since 2014, when charters stood at 12.4% and traditional districts at 14.9%, but the gap has persisted. Several charter schools sit below 7%: STEP Academy (6.0%), New Century School (6.0%), and Metro Schools Charter (4.5%). Whether this reflects enrollment patterns, mission-specific populations, or differential identification practices is a question Minnesota has not systematically answered.

Large districts feel it most in the budget

Among the state's largest districts, St. Cloud^↗ carries the highest special education rate at 24.9%, up from 20.0% in 2014. Duluth^↗ stands at 24.8%, up 8.0 percentage points over the period. Cambridge-Isanti^↗ and Buffalo-Hanover-Montrose^↗ each saw their rates jump by 9.6 percentage points, the largest increases among large districts, reaching 22.5% and 23.4% respectively.

Minneapolis^↗ is the notable outlier. Its special education rate rose only 0.9 percentage points, from 18.2% to 19.1%, the smallest increase among the state's 40 largest districts. Minneapolis is also the only large district where the absolute number of special education students declined, from 6,588 to 5,742, a drop that tracks with the district's overall enrollment losses.

Anoka-Hennepin^↗, the state's largest district, crossed 20% in 2026, reaching 20.3% with 7,797 students receiving services, up from 5,658 in 2014.

The 20% horizon

The 20% threshold is symbolic, but it carries real weight. It means a school of 500 students has roughly 100 IEPs to staff, fund, and comply with. It means one in five families navigating the special education process. And it means general education budgets absorbing an ever-larger share of costs that state and federal funding does not cover.

The Blue Ribbon Commission's work, due by the 2026 session, will determine whether Minnesota attempts to slow the growth in costs or simply funds the system at its current trajectory. The distinction matters: "cost control" in special education usually means tightening identification criteria or capping service levels, decisions that directly affect which students receive support.

Even at 44% state coverage, the cross-subsidy that districts absorb from their general funds exceeds $400 million a year. Every new IEP adds to the total. Minnesota added 3,520 special education students in 2026 alone, and the Blue Ribbon Commission tasked with finding $250 million in savings has not yet reported. Meanwhile, the legislature cut special education transportation reimbursement by $43.2 million over two years. The 20% threshold is symbolic. The billion-dollar structural gap between what the law requires and what the state funds is not.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Minnesota's Charter Movement Hits a Ceiling

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In this series: Minnesota 2025-26 Enrollment.

In 2008-09, Minnesota's charter sector added 4,742 students in a single year. In 2025-26, it added 418.

That is the smallest annual gain in the 20 years of available data, a 0.6% increase for a sector that tripled over the prior two decades. Minnesota's 169 charter schools enrolled 72,770 students in 2025-26, 8.3% of statewide K-12 enrollment, the same share as the year before. The state that passed the nation's first charter school law in 1991 has, 35 years later, hit a ceiling.

The plateau arrived just as the sector began shrinking in a different way: the number of charter entities peaked at 181 in 2023-24 and fell to 169 by 2025-26, a net loss of 12 schools in two years. Nine closed in 2024 alone, the most in a single year since the movement began.

Thirty-Five Years of Growth, Then a Stall

Minnesota's charter sector has tripled since 2006-07, from 23,701 students in 131 schools to 72,770 in 169 schools. But the growth came in three distinct eras, each slower than the last.

From 2007 to 2014, charters grew from 2.8% to 5.2% of statewide enrollment, adding roughly 2,900 students per year. New schools opened at a pace of seven to 15 annually. From 2014 to 2020, the pace slowed: share rose from 5.2% to 7.0%, with annual gains of about 3,100. Then COVID scrambled the picture. Charter enrollment surged by 3,236 students in 2020-21 as families fled traditional districts, which lost 24,356 students in a single year.

Since 2022, the picture has changed. Annual charter growth dropped to 608 in 2021-22, recovered partially to 2,586 in 2024-25, then collapsed to 418 in 2025-26. Share gains decelerated from half a percentage point per year during COVID to 0.08 points this year.

The 418-student gain in 2025-26 is worth comparing to the traditional sector's loss of 3,989 students that same year. Charters are no longer growing fast enough to absorb even a fraction of the students leaving traditional districts. The traditional sector actually gained 4,193 students in 2024-25 before giving them right back.

The Closure Wave

Of the 245 charter entities that have appeared in state enrollment data since 2006-07, 76 have closed. That is 31%, closely matching a Sahan Journal investigation that found one-third of all Minnesota charters ever opened have shuttered.

The closures accelerated sharply in 2023-24 and 2024-25. Nine entities disappeared from state data in 2024, including LoveWorks Academy for Arts, which at its peak enrolled 362 students, and Upper Mississippi Academy in St. Paul, which had 313 students before financial difficulties forced its doors shut. Five more closed in 2025, including Athlos Academy of Saint Cloud, which had reached 687 students before its authorizer declined to renew its contract.

New openings have nearly stopped. Only one new charter entity appeared in state data in each of the last three years, down from 10 in 2021-22. The net effect: 14 fewer charter schools operating in Minnesota than two years ago.

Who Charters Serve

The sector's demographics explain both its political importance and the stakes of its stagnation. Minnesota's charter schools serve a fundamentally different student body than its traditional districts.

Black students make up 31.8% of charter enrollment but 10.9% of traditional enrollment, a ratio of 2.9 to 1. Asian students, many from Minnesota's large Hmong community, comprise 15.2% of charter enrollment versus 6.4% in traditional districts. White students are 34.1% of charter enrollment, compared with 61.7% of traditional districts.

Hmong College Prep Academy^↗ in Brooklyn Park enrolls 2,456 students and serves a predominantly Hmong student body. Higher Ground Academy^↗ in St. Paul, which enrolls 1,177 students, serves a nearly 100% Black, predominantly Somali community. Hiawatha Academies^↗ in Minneapolis grew from 145 students in 2008 to 1,683 in 2026. These are not schools that exist to offer suburban families an alternative to their already-functional district. They are institutions built around specific communities.

That makes the charter ceiling a different kind of problem than it would be in states where charters primarily serve as escape valves from large urban districts. In Minnesota, a shrinking charter sector means fewer options for communities that built schools specifically because the traditional system was not serving them.

What Stopped the Growth

The most direct factor is arithmetic. New openings dropped to one per year while closures surged to nine. No sector can grow when it is losing more schools than it creates.

But the reasons behind the closure wave are themselves contested. Charter advocates point to a hostile funding environment: Minnesota charters receive roughly 70% of the per-pupil funding that traditional districts get, since they receive state funds but not local property tax revenue. Governor Walz's 2025-26 budget proposal would cut an additional $40 million from charter funding, including eliminating long-term facilities maintenance support and special education tuition adjustments.

"Charter schools are currently asked to operate with 30 percent less funding than their public-school counterparts." — Letter to Minnesota Legislature, cited in City Journal, 2025

On the other side, the Minnesota Department of Education has increased accountability requirements, creating three dedicated fraud detection positions and requiring authorizers to file more than 1,000 pages of documentation per school annually. The 2024 legislative session imposed new charter requirements, including language access plans, procurement policies, and documentation mandates that add administrative burden to an already-stretched sector. Proponents of stronger oversight argue that closures represent the system working as intended: low-performing schools exit, protecting students from sustained failure.

The national picture suggests Minnesota is not alone. The Network for Public Education reported that 50 charter schools nationwide announced closures in the first half of 2025 alone, adding to 218 that closed or never opened between 2022 and 2024.

Consolidation, Not Collapse

The data tells a story that is more nuanced than either "charters are dying" or "charters are thriving." What is actually happening is consolidation. The average charter school in Minnesota enrolled 431 students in 2025-26, up from 181 in 2006-07. Small, fragile charters are closing. Larger, established ones are stable or still growing.

Minnesota Transitions Charter School^↗, the state's largest charter, grew from 1,274 students in 2007 to 6,425 in 2026, with a COVID-era surge from 3,593 to 5,508 in a single year. Metro Schools Charter quadrupled from 400 students in 2020 to 1,643 in 2026. But the schools that closed were almost all small: of the 23 charters that closed since 2020, the median peak enrollment was 105 students. Only four ever exceeded 350, and only one, Athlos Academy of Saint Cloud at 687, could be considered mid-sized.

This consolidation pattern carries a risk. The charter sector is increasingly dependent on a small number of large operators. If a school like Minnesota Transitions, which alone accounts for 4.4% of all charter enrollment, were to face difficulties, the impact would ripple across the sector's enrollment totals.

The Question Minnesota Invented

Minnesota passed the nation's first charter school law on June 4, 1991. The original statute allowed a maximum of eight schools, with only school districts authorized to sponsor them. That cap was lifted, the authorizer framework was expanded, and by the mid-2000s the sector was growing at double-digit rates.

Thirty-five years later, the state's charter share sits at 8.3%, and the growth engine has stalled. Whether that represents a natural market equilibrium, the accumulated effect of a funding structure that starves smaller schools, or something else entirely depends on which side of the charter debate you occupy. The data cannot adjudicate between those explanations.

What the data does show is the next pressure point. Governor Walz's proposed $685 million in education cuts over four years would hit both sectors, but charters, with their thinner financial margins, have less room to absorb the blow. The nine closures in 2024 happened before those cuts take effect. The 2026-27 enrollment numbers will reveal whether the plateau becomes a decline.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.