The Rochester City School District could be missing out on more than $2 million in potential Medicaid reimbursements from last school year due to missing paperwork, according to a district administrator.
The district is missing about 1,000 parental consent forms it must have to determine whether the needed services for a student with disabilities are eligible for Medicaid reimbursement. Those services include things like speech therapy, special transportation and physical therapy that are part of a student’s Individualized Education Program, or IEP.
“All my colleagues in the rest of the big five school districts are struggling just like us,” Medicaid Compliance Officer Mike Sausa said in a recent school board meeting.
Signed parental consent forms are a critical piece to getting students support and determining Medicaid eligibility, Sausa said, adding that the district is working to resolve those discrepancies. He said it's a potential loss of $1.3 million in Medicaid reimbursements.
“[It] is a one-time parental consent for the life of the IEP,” he said. “... It's the first step that starts the Medicaid eligibility for the students. So if we don't have the Medicaid consent, we can't even begin in our process, which is revenue being lost for the district.”
School board member Beatriz LeBron-Harris said streamlining the process for families could make it easier to get through that paperwork.
“It's easy to lose a consent form and also easy for parents to not understand how critical their permission is before we can move forward,” LeBron-Harris said. “Even though you might be coming to us to say, ‘My student needs all of these services,’ until that is handwritten, you signed, we can't do anything about it.”
For students whose eligibility has already been determined, Sausa said that there’s another piece of paperwork that is either missing or inconsistent for about 1,600 students: client identification numbers.
"It's a larger population where we're losing over $2 million because there, although we have the consent form — which, when we do get the consent form, they tend to match — there's a large population sitting out there that we just cannot match within the current system," he said.
Nearly 4,400 students who are classified as having a disability were enrolled in the city school district in the 2023-24 school year, according to the state Education Department’s most recent data.
