Hi, I'm Dan Pramak, and welcome to a special four-part weekend edition of Axios Recap,

focused on the unique challenges of Back to School in 2020.

This is all tied to an Axios deep dive presented by Pearson,

and this particular episode digs into the strains on special education.

That conversation with Axios's Erica Pandy in 15

seconds. We're joined now by Axios reporter Erica Pandy. So Erica, let's start here. What are

public schools K through 12 legally required to do when it comes to serving students with special

needs? So public schools then are federally mandated to create these things called IEPs,

which are individualized education plans for students who have any sort of special needs.

So that's behavioral or learning disability, anything like that.

That encompasses about 7 million American students and students have to create sort of an

individualized course of study for these students. Obviously, everybody in the spring,

kind of all classrooms moving online, it didn't work all that well. I did hear from parents

of special needs kids anecdotally that it seemed to work

particularly poorly for them. Is that kind of a consensus that moving special ed online is even

more challenging than moving, for lack of a better term, regular ed online? Every school around

the country had about one day to do this and they barely were able to get normal classroom,

traditional instruction online, any kind of

individualized plan switching that to the web was virtually impossible. So schools just kind of didn't,

and they didn't really know what they were doing. And there's lots of aspects to special education

that require in-person instruction or behavioral support or being able to touch the student and be in the same room as a student,

and obviously all of that was rendered completely impossible.

...