Special Education Identification Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

We use student-level data on elementary special education identification from Washington state to explore student identification rates in the months immediately after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and over 2 subsequent years. Special education identification rates dropped dramatically in March 2020 through the end of the 2019–20 school year and remained below historical norms through 2020–21 before returning to pre-pandemic levels early in 2021–22. The magnitude of these effects implies that over 8,000 fewer elementary students were identified for special education services during the pandemic in Washington than would have been expected based on prior trends.