When auditors from the State Comptroller's office surveyed school districts about preschool special education, 455 of the 550 that answered said they kept a waitlist for services. The State Education Department, which oversees the program, could not say how many children were on those lists. That finding anchored the December 2024 audit, which closed with seven recommendations for Albany, and on Oct. 7 the same office went back to see what had been done.

Three of the seven fixes are in place, and four were rated partially implemented in follow-up report 2026-F-5, which measured progress as of August 2026. The unfinished four include the two that matter most to a 3-year-old waiting on speech therapy this fall. One is a plan for the statewide shortage of preschool providers, and the other is monitoring that would show, close to real time, where children are going without.

A total of 82,682 children between 3 and 5 received preschool special education programs or services at some point during the 2024-25 school year, the Comptroller reported. Those services run from speech, occupational and physical therapy to special classes, specialized instruction, parent training and counseling. The figure counts every child served across a full year, so it measures something different from the 40,846 children the department counted on a single day in October 2022.

The legal clock is what turns a waitlist into a violation. A child is referred in writing to the home district and then evaluated, once a parent consents, by an approved agency or the district's own team. The district's Committee on Preschool Special Education then has 60 calendar days from that consent to produce an Individualized Education Program. Services must begin as soon as possible after that and no later than 60 school days from consent, the same timeline our guide to getting a child evaluated for special education walks through step by step.

The first unfinished recommendation asked the department to build a strategy for the provider shortage and to help districts find the services children were owed. Auditors found the department studying alternative ways to set tuition rates for providers, with stakeholder meetings, polls and surveys on the idea. It has also drafted guidance letting districts combine preschool special education money, known as 4410 funding after its section of state law, with Universal Prekindergarten dollars. The 2025-26 rate methodology adds a 2.9 percent increase for special class and integrated classroom programs, and the auditors told the department to keep moving toward a new rate-setting method.

The second partial fix concerned monitoring. Starting in 2025-26, the department sorts districts into five categories on a Results Driven Accountability matrix and selects those that fall short for coordinated intervention. It has also drafted guidance on compensatory services, reminding districts that an IEP must reflect what a child needs rather than which programs or staff happen to be available. What it has not done is track regional need for providers as that need develops, and officials told auditors they lack the data infrastructure to assess student need continuously.

Data quality is the third. Districts on the monitoring cycle now certify that their numbers are accurate and must keep the documents to back them up. Incomplete submissions count as noncompliance, and when problems persist after what auditors describe as usually two or three rounds of updates, the department pulls student records for review. The accuracy of the whole system, the report notes, still rests on districts vouching for themselves.

The fourth asked the department to make clear to families which preschool programs actually operate and how to report problems. The department is building an online Program Approvals System that would let parents search by county, city, ZIP code, provider and type of service, with results on an interactive map. Staff have also briefed BOCES officials, special education administrators and districts on the reporting rules. The search tool was still in development when auditors checked in August.

The completed items were largely administrative. The department moved its initial program application online, merged two applications into one and dropped certain health and safety paperwork for private providers already licensed by the Office of Children and Family Services. A March 2025 memo set up quarterly reporting of special education events data. That memo also created a risk-based plan for flagging districts that fall out of compliance, report no records or miss filing deadlines, and it reminded districts to keep referral and evaluation records for six years.

The follow-up includes no new statewide count of children waiting, and the department's own explanation for its unfinished monitoring is that it cannot yet see student need as it changes. That leaves families leaning on numbers that surface in local budget fights. In New York City, Education Department officials said at a March budget hearing that only 63 percent of preschool students with disabilities were receiving all of their mandated related services. In July, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced $67.5 million for 250 preschool seats across 26 schools in 14 of the city's 32 local districts. A spokesperson would not say whether that would guarantee every child a seat.

Outside the city, the strain often begins before a child turns 3. Children leaving Early Intervention are supposed to have an IEP in place by their third birthday. The Children's Agenda in Rochester reported this summer that about 20 percent of children statewide did not receive Early Intervention services on time. The number of licensed speech therapists working in Early Intervention in Monroe County fell 25 percent between 2019 and 2024, according to reports. Brigit Hurley, the group's chief program officer, called a recent 5 percent rate increase "sprinkles on dry ground for the providers who have been waiting for more reimbursement."

State Sen. Jim Tedisco, the ranking Republican on the Senate Education Committee, responded to the first audit in December 2024 by drawing on his own classroom years, according to Nexstar. "As a former special education teacher, I know first-hand how critical special education services are to children in need," he said.

The money side of the system surfaced in the same week. Counties pay the bills for preschool special education and the state reimburses 59.5 percent, while tuition rates for classroom programs are set from the costs providers report to the department. Under what it calls its Preschool Special Education Audit Initiative, the Comptroller released three provider audits alongside the follow-up. Together they flagged $1,201,103 in reported costs that did not meet state rules.

At The Starting Place in Hudson, run by the Columbia County chapter of NYSARC, auditors found $271,842 in noncompliant costs out of about $3.8 million reported over three fiscal years ending June 30, 2022. That included $231,077 in staffing above the ratios the department had approved and $35,198 in bonus pay, according to the audit. The program serves children from Columbia, Dutchess, Greene and Ulster counties.

The Guild for Exceptional Children in New York City served about 227 preschoolers in fiscal 2021 and is paid by city schools at rates the state sets from its reported costs. Auditors flagged $258,712 of roughly $17.2 million, led by $120,404 in unsupported or poorly documented expenses, according to the report.

The largest finding, $670,549, came from The Children's Home of Kingston, although the audited program is not a preschool one. It is a school-age special class serving 44 students between 8 and 21, and the total includes $198,335 for one-to-one aides that auditors said were charged to the program incorrectly, the Kingston audit found.

The department has been asked, but not required, to tell the Comptroller within 30 days of the Oct. 7 report what it plans to do about the unresolved items. That window closes in the first week of November. Families whose child has an IEP but no therapist can put the delay in writing to the district's preschool committee chair now. Our guide to what to do once your child has an IEP lays out the complaint and mediation routes the state offers when services never start.