In a Las Vegas apartment, a 9-year-old girl named Dani lines up her shoes by the door every night before bed. It is the same nightly ritual not because her mother asked her to, but because keeping things in order is one of the few things that quiets the noise in her head. Dani is autistic, and the routine that keeps her steady at home is the same one that her school no longer has enough staff to support during the day.

Three hundred miles north, in Reno, a boy named Marcus sits outside the principal's office for the second time this week. He is not in trouble. He is waiting again for a speech therapist who is supposed to see him twice a week, but whose caseload has tripled since two colleagues left the district.

And out past Winnemucca, in a stretch of rural Nevada where the nearest occupational therapist covers four counties, a little girl's family drives 90 minutes each way for a therapy session that used to happen down the hall.

These are a few of the kids I've met through my work in Nevada special education. (Their names and identifying details have been changed to protect their privacy.) Three kids. Three corners of the state. One thread connecting them: a promise that Nevada is struggling to keep.

Congress is currently deciding how much to spend on special education for the coming year, and the leading proposals basically keep the total dollar amount the same as last year. This might sound responsible. It is not. That's because special education enrollment is climbing in Nevada, and the cost of hiring a speech therapist or a behavior specialist is also climbing. Holding the check steady while the need grows just means we're slowly falling behind, one caseload at a time.

Clark County entered last school year with its lowest overall teacher vacancy level in years. However, of the 320 vacant classroom positions, 163 of them were in special education. The district's general staffing had recovered, but its special education staffing has not kept pace.

Nevada has already seen what happens when this funding becomes unreliable. Tens of millions of dollars in federal school funding were withheld from the state during a federal budget review, and districts had to plan staffing without knowing if the money would ever arrive. Nevada joined litigation over this. This was not a hypothetical. It happened here, to schools your kids or grandkids may attend, and it shows exactly how a funding delay becomes a staffing freeze and a service a family stops receiving.

Making matters harder, the Department of Education signed new agreements in June, shifting much of its special education oversight to the Department of Health and Human Services, with civil rights enforcement moving to the Department of Justice. The office that families and school districts have relied on for decades to answer questions, resolve disputes and keep funding on schedule is being reorganized and its duties handed to agencies that have never run a classroom. 

When that office gets weaker, so does every family's ability to get a straight answer.

Think of the last time you waited on hold for something you were promised — insurance, a refund, a callback that never came. Now imagine how that sense of helplessness feels if you're 7 years old and can't advocate for yourself.

Funding delays and cuts mean school districts cannot fill open positions for therapists, aides and behavior specialists. Fewer staff means that the people who remain carry larger caseloads. Larger caseloads mean that a child's session gets pushed from twice a week to once a week, then to whenever there is room. That is the moment a family notices something has changed and starts asking questions that used to get simple answers.

Those families aren't remaining silent. They're filing more complaints related to special education. This is not because parents have become difficult. It is because the informal path — a phone call, a meeting and a promise kept — keeps running into the same wall: not enough people left to keep the promise. The Learning Policy Institute's most recent national count found more than 425,000 teaching positions either unfilled or filled by someone not fully certified for the job — about one in eight nationwide — with special education named a shortage area in 45 states. This is the third year in a row that those numbers have worsened.

Here is what every Nevada parent should understand, not just the ones raising a child with an individualized education program: Special education is not a separate wing of the school building. It is a load-bearing wall for the whole structure. 

When a student's support disappears, that student does not disappear. They remain in the classroom, often without the tools they need to regulate, communicate or keep pace, and the ripple reaches every child sitting near them and every teacher trying to teach a lesson around them. A general education teacher with 30 students and one unsupported student in crisis is not teaching 30 students that day. The teacher is managing a crisis while 30 students wait.

There is also public promise at stake that predates any one child's diagnosis. Nevada, like every state, made a commitment decades ago that public education means an education for every child, not just the ones who arrive ready to learn on the system's terms. That promise is why we have public schools at all instead of a patchwork of private arrangements available only to families who can pay or advocate their way in. 

When we let that promise erode quietly through flat budgets and outsourced oversight, we are not just failing kids with disabilities. We are redefining what public education means for everyone.

And there is a cost that arrives later, on a different ledger. A child who does not get support at age 7 is more likely to need expensive interventions at 15: disciplinary removals, involvement with the juvenile system, the risk of dropout and the long-term costs of unemployment or underemployment that follows. 

Every dollar Nevada declines to spend on early, adequate support tends to resurface later as a dollar spent somewhere more expensive and less kind. 

None of this requires a miracle to fix. It requires Nevada's congressional delegation to support funding special education at a level that keeps pace with need, and it requires every one of us to ask our local school board: How long are families waiting right now, and what is being done about it?

Kenyon Andrews is an exceptional needs specialist, author and educational leader based in Las Vegas. He teaches at Somerset Academy's Losee campus.