Bainbridge Island - EdTribune WA - Washington Education Data

1 in 20 Washington Students Now Has a 504 Plan

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

On Bainbridge Island, 17% of public school students have a Section 504 disability accommodation plan. In Federal Way^↗, 30 miles to the southeast and serving a student body more than six times as large, the rate is 2.9%.

Both districts operate under the same federal law. Both serve students with ADHD, anxiety, diabetes, and other conditions that can substantially limit a major life activity. The enrollment data cannot measure disability prevalence directly, only identification rates. But a sixfold gap between neighboring districts points less to differences in how many students have disabilities than to differences in who gets evaluated and who gets the paperwork that converts a diagnosis into a classroom accommodation.

Statewide, Section 504 plans have quadrupled over 16 years, from 13,762 students (1.3% of enrollment) in 2009-10 to a peak of 60,833 (5.5%) in 2024-25. Combined with the 16.4% special education rate that year, more than one in five Washington students carried some form of documented disability accommodation. That combined rate was 14.5% in 2010.

Then, in 2025-26, 504 plans dropped by 6,440 students, the largest single-year decline on record.

The law changed before the culture did

The acceleration began before COVID, before the youth mental health crisis entered the national vocabulary, before pandemic-era telehealth made ADHD diagnoses easier to obtain. It started with a legal change.

The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008, effective January 2009, broadened the definition of disability under both the ADA and Section 504. The new standard lowered the threshold: impairments no longer needed to "prevent or severely or significantly restrict" a major life activity to qualify. The law expanded the list of major life activities to include concentrating, reading, and thinking, and it barred schools from considering how well a student's medication or coping strategies managed their condition.

For students with ADHD, the effect was immediate. A student earning good grades could no longer be denied a 504 plan on that basis alone. Federal guidance later reinforced that "grades alone are an insufficient basis" for determining whether a student has a disability.

Washington's data shows the result. In 2009-10, 184 districts reported any 504 students. By 2024-25, 283 districts did. The statewide count grew every single year from 2010 through 2019, averaging 3,825 new 504 plans annually.

The pandemic interrupted, then turbocharged growth

COVID-19 briefly reversed the trend. Schools lost 1,062 Section 504 students in 2019-20 and another 1,477 in 2020-21, as remote learning made evaluations difficult and some families disengaged from formal accommodation processes entirely.

The rebound was swift and steep. From 2021-22 to 2022-23, the state added 8,363 Section 504 students in a single year, an 18.0% jump that dwarfed any pre-pandemic annual increase. The post-pandemic growth rate from 2021 to 2025 averaged 3,797 new plans per year, roughly matching the pre-pandemic pace, but compressed into a recovery surge that peaked in 2022-23 and 2023-24.

The timing coincides with a national surge in ADHD diagnoses. Between 2016 and 2022, approximately one million additional children received ADHD diagnoses nationwide, bringing the overall rate to 11.4% of children ages 3 to 17. Post-pandemic awareness campaigns, expanded telehealth access, and heightened attention to youth mental health all contributed to more families seeking evaluations.

But rising diagnoses alone do not explain the pattern in Washington's data. If they did, 504 rates would be climbing at roughly similar rates everywhere. They are not.

Where you live determines whether you get identified

The correlation between district wealth and 504 identification is stark. Among Washington districts with at least 2,000 students, the correlation between a district's economically disadvantaged rate and its Section 504 rate is -0.62: the more affluent the district, the higher the 504 rate.

Bainbridge Island^↗, where fewer than 15% of students are economically disadvantaged, identifies 17.0% of its enrollment on 504 plans. Northshore^↗, a large suburban district north of Kirkland, identifies 10.7%. Snoqualmie Valley^↗ and Shoreline^↗ both exceed 10%.

At the other end: Yakima^↗, where more than 75% of students are economically disadvantaged, identifies 3.4%. Highline^↗, just south of Seattle, identifies 1.3%. Federal Way, at 2.9%, serves a student body nearly the size of Bainbridge Island, Mercer Island, Snoqualmie Valley, and Shoreline combined.

This pattern is consistent with national research. A policy brief from the National Education Policy Center found that Section 504's "broad eligibility criteria, lack of funding, and substantial deference to the professional judgment of educators" have favored families with the resources to pursue private evaluations. White students are more than twice as likely as Black or Hispanic students to have a 504 plan nationally, despite comparable rates of underlying conditions like ADHD.

"Section 504's broad eligibility criteria, lack of funding, and substantial deference to the professional judgment of educators and external evaluators have favored powerful and privileged families." -- National Education Policy Center, 2024

The mechanism is straightforward. Section 504 is an unfunded federal mandate. Unlike special education under IDEA, which carries dedicated federal funding, 504 plans bring no additional dollars to districts. Schools must provide the accommodations (extended test time, preferential seating, modified assignments, breaks for medication) but receive nothing to pay for them. Districts with smaller caseloads have less institutional infrastructure for evaluations. Families in those districts may not know a 504 plan exists, may lack access to private psychologists who can document a qualifying condition, or may face language barriers in navigating the referral process.

The 2025-26 reversal

After 13 years of growth interrupted only by COVID, Section 504 plans fell by 6,440 students in 2025-26, dropping from 60,833 to 54,393. The statewide rate slid from 5.5% to 5.0%.

The decline was not uniform. Eight fewer districts reported any 504 students at all (275, down from 283). Some individual district drops suggest reporting changes rather than genuine declines: Cheney^↗ fell from 186 to one, and Grandview fell from 71 to two, patterns more consistent with a data submission issue than a mass revocation of accommodation plans.

But the drop also touched large districts with no obvious reporting anomaly. Seattle^↗ lost 458 Section 504 students. Lake Washington^↗ lost 310. Lake Stevens^↗ lost 292. Battle Ground lost 576. Whether these reflect tightened identification criteria, families leaving the public system, or a natural plateau after a decade of rapid expansion is not yet clear from the data alone.

What 1 in 5 means for schools

Even after the 2025-26 decline, the combined accommodation rate tells a structural story. In 2025-26, 54,393 students hold 504 plans (5.0%) and 169,080 receive special education services (15.4%). Together, that is 20.4% of Washington's enrollment, up from 14.5% in 2010.

This is not a temporary phenomenon. The special education rate has climbed steadily from 13.2% to 15.4% over 17 years, and Section 504 rates, even with the 2025-26 correction, remain nearly four times their 2010 level.

For districts, the fiscal implication is real. Special education carries per-pupil costs well above the base rate, funded partly through IDEA. Section 504 accommodations receive no categorical funding at all. Every extended-time test, every behavioral intervention plan, every physical accommodation comes out of the district's general fund. As 504 caseloads have grown fourfold, the unfunded cost of compliance has grown with them.

A federal law under federal challenge

The legal foundation for all of this is not as secure as it was a year ago. Seventeen states have filed suit in Texas v. Becerra challenging the constitutionality of Section 504 itself. While the lawsuit's proximate trigger was the Biden administration's 2024 rule update, the states' legal brief asks the court to "declare Section 504 unconstitutional" and "enjoin enforcement" of the law entirely. Washington is not among the plaintiff states.

If the challenge succeeds, 54,393 Washington students would lose the federal guarantee that schools must provide them with disability accommodations. Whether the state's own laws would fill that gap is an open question.

The more immediate question is local. The sixfold gap between Bainbridge Island's 17.0% identification rate and Federal Way's 2.9% is not a gap in disability prevalence. It is a gap in access to the system that documents disability and converts it into classroom support. Four times as many students hold 504 plans as in 2010. Whether the students who need them most are the ones getting them is a different question, and the data suggests they are not.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.

Gender X Grew 6,300% in Washington Schools, Then the Count Reversed

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In 2014-15, Washington's public schools counted 77 students who identified as neither male nor female. By 2023-24, that number had reached 4,979, a 6,362% increase that made Washington one of the most significant datasets in the country for tracking nonbinary student identity. Then the count began falling: 4,491 in 2024-25, 4,082 in 2025-26. Two consecutive years of decline, totaling 897 students, or 18.0% below the peak.

The reversal raises a question the data alone cannot resolve. Are fewer students identifying outside the gender binary, or are fewer schools recording it?

A trajectory unlike anything else in the enrollment data

Gender X appeared in Washington's CEDARS data system when OSPI began allowing districts to report a third gender category alongside male and female. The initial numbers were tiny: 77 students statewide in 2015, 91 in 2016, 194 in 2017. Growth was measurable but easy to overlook in a system enrolling over a million students.

That changed in 2018-19, when the count nearly tripled in a single year, jumping from 269 to 806. Washington had adopted an "X" gender marker on birth certificates in January 2018, allowing individuals to select a designation that is "not exclusively male or female." The timing aligns: as official state documents began recognizing nonbinary identity, school reporting followed.

The steepest acceleration came in 2021-22, when Gender X enrollment more than doubled from 1,854 to 3,855, an increase of 2,001 students in a single year. That 107.9% jump coincided with districts implementing OSPI's Gender-Inclusive Schools policy, which required all districts to adopt policy 3211 by January 2020 and mandated that schools change a student's gender designation upon request with no proof of legal change required.

Year	Gender X students	Share of enrollment	Change from prior year
2015	77	0.007%	--
2018	269	0.024%	+75
2019	806	0.071%	+537
2021	1,854	0.170%	+579
2022	3,855	0.353%	+2,001
2024	4,979	0.453%	+101
2025	4,491	0.406%	-488
2026	4,082	0.372%	-409

What the district map reveals

The spread of Gender X reporting across districts tells a parallel story. In 2018-19, just 69 of 325 districts (21.2%) reported any Gender X students. By 2022-23, that number had climbed to 196 of 330 (59.4%). But then it, too, began retreating: 183 districts in 2024, 170 in 2025, and 165 of 328 in 2026. Thirty-one districts stopped reporting Gender X students over three years, even as the category remained available in CEDARS.

The geographic distribution is uneven. Olympia^↗ leads all districts in Gender X share at 4.69%, with 454 of its 9,672 students identified as Gender X in 2025-26. Clover Park^↗, near Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Lakewood, has the second-highest rate at 3.90% (498 students out of 12,777) and is the only large district where Gender X counts are still climbing, rising from one student in 2019 to 498 in 2026.

Seattle^↗, the state's largest district with 50,898 students, has the most Gender X students by count (591) but a lower rate of 1.16%. Seattle's Gender X enrollment peaked at 658 in 2024-25 and has since declined by 10.2%. Bainbridge Island^↗, a smaller district of 3,461 students, reports a rate of 1.91%, the third highest among districts above 1,000 students.

The divergent trajectories

The five-district comparison reveals strikingly different patterns. Seattle climbed rapidly from seven students in 2019 to 654 in 2024 before declining. Tacoma^↗ plateaued around 90 to 104 since 2022. Spokane^↗ leveled off near 55 in 2023 and has drifted slightly downward. Clover Park, by contrast, has grown every single year since 2019, accelerating from 144 in 2022 to 498 in 2026.

Olympia's trajectory is the most dramatic among mid-sized districts. After reporting just two Gender X students in 2019, it jumped to 306 in 2024 and 462 in 2025 before edging back to 454 in 2026. The district's 4.69% rate is more than 12 times the statewide average of 0.37%.

Reporting artifact or real shift?

The two-year decline invites competing explanations.

One possibility is a reporting change. The state-level Gender X total has consistently exceeded the sum of all district-level Gender X counts, with the gap narrowing from 592 in 2022 to just 73 in 2026. This suggests that how Gender X is recorded at the state versus district level has evolved, and changes in reporting methodology could depress or inflate totals without any underlying shift in student identity. The number of districts reporting Gender X students has also declined, which could reflect either fewer students identifying as nonbinary in those districts or a pullback in how actively schools record the designation.

The political environment has shifted. In February 2025, OSPI and the La Center School District clashed publicly over gender identity disclosure, with OSPI finding the district had violated state anti-discrimination laws by refusing to proactively use students' requested pronouns. The district's superintendent rejected the findings and consulted legal counsel. Citizen initiatives filed in early 2026 seek to repeal modifications to Washington's parental rights law that expanded protections for LGBTQ+ students, with more than 416,000 signatures gathered. Whether this political friction discourages some families or schools from recording a nonbinary designation is unknowable from the enrollment data.

A third possibility: the pattern may simply reflect natural variation in an emerging category. Gender X reached 0.45% of enrollment in 2024 and has since settled to 0.37%. In a population of 1.1 million students, these are small shares, and year-to-year fluctuation is expected as schools and families navigate a relatively new reporting option.

A dataset with few peers

Washington is one of roughly 10 states plus the District of Columbia that allow districts to report a third gender category for students, though approaches vary. Oregon uses "X," California uses "nonbinary," Rhode Island uses "other," and Utah offers "transgender" and "prefer not to identify." Few states have data reaching back as far as Washington's 2015 baseline, making this one of the longest continuous datasets of nonbinary student identification in the country.

The federal trajectory has moved in the opposite direction. The U.S. Department of Education proposed removing transgender and nonbinary categories from its mandated Civil Rights Data Collection, which would eliminate the federal government's ability to track these students at scale. That decision makes state-level data like Washington's more important as the only longitudinal measure available.

The 2026-27 test

The 2026-27 school year will clarify whether the two-year decline is a correction from an unsustainable peak or the beginning of a sustained reversal. Two signals matter. First, the district count: if the number of districts reporting Gender X students continues to fall, the decline is more likely a reporting phenomenon than a shift in student identity. Second, Clover Park's trajectory: with 498 Gender X students and a 3.90% rate in a district of 12,777, its continued growth while peers decline deserves scrutiny, whether it reflects more inclusive recording practices, community demographics near a military installation, or something else entirely.

The broader question is whether Washington's Gender X data will survive the political headwinds now pressing against it. A dataset that took 12 years to build, and that has no federal equivalent, could become less reliable not because students changed but because the systems recording them did.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.