The Managed Collapse of Indiana Special Education: Trading Clinical Care for Classroom Chaos

Choking off Medicaid ABA waiver hours while generating record state surpluses, Indiana bureaucrats are shifting a massive medical burden onto general education teachers who are barely hanging on
May 31, 2026

The August Tsunami in Landlocked Indiana

There is an ugly, calculated shell game happening right now within the halls of Indiana's state government, and come August, our public school classrooms are going to feel the impact like a structural collapse. The state of Indiana is systemically cutting Medicaid ABA hours, forcing working parents to choose paying for ABA services $11,000.00 out of pocket (Yes you read that right) or putting their child in Indiana Public Schools who quite simply are overburdened, overworked and underfunded. Teachers will not get any administrative support. These are college educated teachers with a 4 year degree who will simply resign and go into the private sector.
Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) has operated under a veil of aggressive administrative silence

Since the beginning of the year, the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) has operated under a veil of aggressive administrative silence. They have frozen public financial reporting and quietly rolled out a brutal ‘Waiver Reset’ designed to slash life-sustaining services for disabled children across the state. The most devastating blow is the implementation of a rigid, unilateral 4,000-hour lifetime cap on Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy.

I have requested a comment from the state director of communications (no reply) and then filed a FOIA with the Federal Government. See the receipts here:

https://www.in.gov/fssa/monthly-medicaid-financial-reporting/ — State of Indiana, notice there has been monthly reporting up until January 2026, when the medicaid cuts were enacted

General education teachers are being handed an impossible, high-stakes directive: act as untrained, unsupported, and unpaid medical intervention teams while simultaneously trying to teach a room full of thirty students. Teachers are already running on empty, exhausted by institutional apathy and a severe lack of classroom resources. Forcing them to manage complex, high-support clinical behaviors with zero specialized training or structural backing isn't "mainstreaming" or "inclusion." It is institutional abandonment. These teachers know that they will get zero administrative support. Lets just follow the money. By pushing a disabled child out of a community-based clinical ABA setting and forcing them into the public school system, the state scores a double financial victory. First, they slash their immediate state Medicaid expenditures, allowing them to boast about massive budget surpluses. Second, the moment that child is enrolled in a public school district, they trigger a flood of federal education funding, including Title IX and IDEA special education allocations. Will that money trickle down to the classrooms?

We all know that will never happen, that money will be moved into athletics, pet administrative projects, more School Resource Officers (its always under the guise of public safety) and Flock cameras.

Get in touch with your local Teacher Organizations, PTOs, and State Legislatures. Our Teachers and Students deserve better than this, than more tax breaks for data centers.