The Special Education Expenditure Project (SEEP): Synthesis of Findings and Policy Implications. inForum.

Expenditure Project 1 was included in a series of studies mandated by Congress in 1997 to measure and evaluate the impact of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). SEEP was the first comprehensive, nationally representative study of special education spending to be undertaken in more than a decade and the fourth in a series of studies over the past 40 years examining the nation’s spending on special education and related services. 2 This article summarizes the results of the SEEP, compares these results to those of the three prior expenditure studies and discusses some of the policy implications of this work. Project Forum at the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE) completed this task as part of its cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).