For Dave Murman, the issue was personal.
The Republican state lawmaker from Glenvil knew Nebraska school districts were denying transfer requests at high rates to students with disabilities — kids who reminded Murman of his now-grown daughter.
In 2025, he brought a bill to ban the disproportionate rejections.
Gov. Jim Pillen signed the bill last month, but by then, it was unrecognizable to the parents and disability advocates who had once backed it.
Murman, facing opposition from schools and the state teachers union, stripped most of the protections for students with disabilities out of the proposal earlier this year. The new focus of the legislation: Allowing schools to suspend their youngest students.
Angela Gleason, whose son Teddy has been denied transfers several times, said it feels like one step forward and two steps back.
“I was like, ‘Oh, it was going to help kids, and now I feel like it’s hurting more kids than it was going to help,’” Gleason said.
The state’s option enrollment policy allows students to transfer from one public school district to another, but in practice, kids with disabilities don’t have the same freedom to transfer as their peers, a 2025 investigation by the Flatwater Free Press and The 74 found.
That trend continued during the 2024-25 school year, according to the latest state report. Nebraska districts denied 35% of option applications from students with individualized education programs (IEPs) compared to about 9% of applications from students without them, a new Flatwater analysis found.
The rejection rates are especially unbalanced in the Omaha suburbs.
Bellevue Public Schools turned away more than three-quarters of students with IEPs but accepted all but one of the 246 applicants without disabilities. The Fort Calhoun, Westside and Douglas County West districts each denied well over half of the kids with IEPs who applied while accepting a majority of kids without IEPs.
Murman’s original bill would have outlawed that. But school administrators and education lobbyists opposed the legislation, contending that districts with dire special ed teaching shortages shouldn’t be forced to take on more kids with IEPs.
The two-term lawmaker knew he didn’t have enough votes from lawmakers willing to buck their local superintendents. So earlier this year, he altered the focus of the legislation.
The amended bill aimed to restore schools’ ability to suspend students in pre-K through second grade for violent behavior, reversing a 2023 ban on the practice.
One option enrollment provision remained: Districts had to guarantee seats for siblings of students who had already optioned in.
After hours of debate on school suspensions, Republican lawmakers passed the bill over objections from Democrats.
The siblings clause will provide an avenue for at least some students with disabilities to get into districts that might otherwise deny them, Murman said.
Sen. Danielle Conrad, a Lincoln Democrat, said Murman hijacked a well-intentioned bill to push Pillen’s priority of removing protections for young students facing punishment.
“If the schools, the Governor and the Legislature won’t act to remedy this clear discrimination on a systemic level, I hope parents start suing the schools to hold them accountable,” Conrad said in an email.
Gleason said it’s disappointing that the bill she thought would help kids like her son Teddy transfer schools will result in more of them being suspended.
In first grade, Omaha Public Schools placed Teddy, who has autism, in a general education classroom where he struggled behaviorally, she said. The school called almost daily asking her to pick him up early, she recalled.
“He basically had a lot of informal suspensions where they would call me and ask me to come get him,” Gleason said. “Then he’s just missing out on the education, and so it just snowballed.”
Across the state, students enrolled in special education were suspended more than twice as often as their peers last school year, according to state data. The Arc of Nebraska, a leading disability advocacy organization, opposed Murman’s bill because of that disciplinary disparity.
Gleason’s other kids are option students at Millard Public Schools, so Teddy could potentially join them under the new law. It’s still upsetting that the opportunity to transfer doesn’t extend to all other children with IEPs, she said.
For the Shada family, the bill comes years too late to make a difference.
Gary Shada, a longtime teacher at Pierce Public Schools in northeast Nebraska, applied for his daughter Kylee to join the district as an option student, but his employer turned her away.
Kylee, who has Down syndrome, has been enrolled at the nearby Plainview district through middle school — separated from her dad and brother in Pierce. With the elder Shada nearing retirement and his son due to graduate next year, he said he doesn’t see the point in bringing Kylee into the district anymore.
The provision in Murman’s bill allowing siblings to transfer might be a step forward, but the missed opportunity still stings, Gary Shada said. Kylee gets along really well with the kids in Pierce, her father said. He wishes Murman’s bill had been in effect when they first applied for option enrollment.
“I think sometimes public schools forget what their reason for existing is,” Shada said. “It’s not about being able to pick and choose who walks through your front door.”
Bellevue Public Schools is short six special ed teachers and about 15 paraprofessionals, and adding more option students with IEPs to “already difficult caseloads is not what is best for teachers or students,” said spokeswoman Amanda Oliver.
“Our decisions are not based on a student’s disability, but on our ability to provide the services required by their IEP in a manner that meets both educational standards and legal obligations,” Oliver said in an email.
Westside Community Schools receives the most option applications in Nebraska, but limitations on staffing and available seats prevent the suburban district from accepting all who apply, spokeswoman Elizabeth Power said.
Grand Island Public Schools, which denied all five of the students with IEPs who applied, is similarly understaffed in special ed and is close to enrollment capacity just with neighborhood students, Superintendent Matt Fisher said in a statement.
“Legally and functionally, we have not been able to accommodate some of the needs of those requesting to enter the district through the option process,” Fisher said.
Staff at the state Department of Education are considering option enrollment rule changes tied to the original and amended versions of Murman’s bill, but it’s not clear what they will look like.
Murman said the disproportionate rejection of kids with disabilities is “pure discrimination.” He is term-limited after this year, but he hopes another lawmaker will take up the cause in the next few years.
Gleason said she appreciated Murman’s intentions, but she’s not hopeful the Legislature will resolve the issue soon, especially given schools’ opposition.
This year, the Legislature also rejected a Democratic proposal that would have required schools to get parents’ approval before changing a student’s IEP. Proponents said the legislation would have given parents a way to fight against schools’ attempts to cut students’ special education services.
Mary Phillips, president of the Arc of Nebraska, takes the long view on advocating for the rights of children with disabilities. It wasn’t until 1975 that a law ensured they could attend their neighborhood schools.
“I feel like progress comes very slow for the disability culture,” Phillips said. “The work isn’t done.”
13 Comments
This article is another great example of the pattern that is consistently observed in virtually everything Flatwater writes about (except when they write those boring restaurant reviews that I assume nobody reads).
Every Flatwater article details something evil the government has done. Yet no Flatwater article (or the authors of such articles, the majority of people who leave comments down below these articles, or the politicians they vote for) ever suggests that perhaps the solution to a government which does evil things is to have LESS of that evil government. Instead, the solution to evil government is that somehow or someway, creating MORE evil government will be better…?
This situation is a perfect example. Public schools are doing something evil (because of course they are, who ever heard anything good about public school?). Yet this is happening in the same state where teachers unions viciously fought to block school choice laws that would have helped students in need to escape from these evil public schools. And also the same state where property taxes are out of control, but nobody is even willing to whisper about the fact that the majority of those taxes are delivered directly to the doorstep of the evil public schools this article is about. And do I even need to mention sex scandals, mass shootings, low test scores, bullying and the dozens of other problems plaguing the public school system? But it’s a golden calf regardless, and it’s continued existence and ever increasing funding levels must NOT be questioned!
“For Dave Murman, the issue was personal.”
We elect representatives to represent the views of constituents, not the legislator’s personal views.
If this legislator held a “personal view” that the Lutheran Church should be recognized by the legislature as the official church of NE, FFP would be up in arms. Or can you imagine a legislator who held a “personal view” that abortions should be paid for by the state of NE because of her own experiences, and pushed legislation to do just that, most folks would be appalled.
When ELECTED, legislators must represent the views of their constituents, not their personal views. As we see in this matter, most folks, including local schools and school personnel, don’t support the legislator’s “personal” crusade.
Why does the FFP simply gloss over what a “representative’ means?
“I feel like progress comes very slow for the disability culture,” Phillips said. “The work isn’t done.”
If ARC wishes to fund the costs to the incoming districts of these transfers, I too would support the change in legislation.
I feel like progress comes very slow for the disability culture when folks like ARC won’t support the work with funding.
I guess it matters what one means by “progress.”
Have we all noticed that FFP does not cover much west of GI?
Or, that FFP does not cover religion in NE?
Surely this myopia does not fulfill FFP’s stated mission to cover all of NE.
““I think sometimes public schools forget what their reason for existing is,” Shada said. “It’s not about being able to pick and choose who walks through your front door.””
As a public school teacher, Mr. Shada should know better. I wager that if 2-3 transfers walked through Mr. Shada’s classroom door, where 29 kids are already working, he’d be up in arms about the additional burden.
But actually, what is the “reason” for the existence of public schools?
Many people operate on the presumption that public school is simply an inevitable facet of our existence. It has existed for the whole duration of their lives and virtually everyone they know attended and graduated from a public school. Their “High School” experience was probably the pinnacle of their lives in some way, if they were the prom queen or the popular class clown. They can’t even imagine a world without public school. Upon meeting the rare person who “dropped out” or was homeschooled, they react with shock and horror, as if they were meeting an alien from another world!
But in reality, public school is a fairly recent invention that only came into existence in the last few centuries. For thousands of years before that, human civilizations rose and accomplished great works of engineering, science, art, literature and yes, even conquest, without a single public school to educate their children. Galileo, Plato and Confucius were all considered legendary thinkers of their time, yet not one set foot in a public school. How did these great human achievements manage to take place before the invention of public school? Why actually do we believe that only vast sums of tax dollars and authoritarian government control can produce an education when the majority of human history says otherwise?
“But in reality, public school is a fairly recent invention that only came into existence in the last few centuries.”
Public schools (as we now know them) can be traced in the US to about 1850.
Prior to that, PUBLIC taxation was used to pay private (mostly sectarian and non-Catholic) schools to educate youths including Protestant religious studies. In the 1850s, the Catholic Church in NY objected to paying for these “public Protestant schools” via taxation and paying for their own Catholic schools. Having some political sway in NY by that time, the Catholic Church was able to gain some public funding for its schools. This eventually led to religiously inclusive public schools designed to compete with the Catholic school system.
So yeah, Mr. Shada is confused about that it means to be a public school.
Waiting for those who never have a positive comment about Flatwater to impress the rest of us with your original articles. Would love for you all to write something informative for us to read. Can you come up with a topic and write an informative article, or is your talent limited to criticizing other writers works?
I don’t think FFP supports free lance writers.
Does it?
J. Gross & Co. clearly have a FFP variety of that derangement syndrome I hear so many people harping on about these days lol
Well Chuck, perhaps I could write you an informative article on the topic of “tu quoque” logical fallacies. The first thing you may want to know about that topic is that you just ran afoul of it.
Monday morning arrives after a busy weekend with numerous newsworthy events, including yet another assassination attempt on the sitting U.S. President. As John Heywood fires up his internet browser, he knows he won’t be reading about any of those newsworthy events on local Nebraska news websites. “But I always hope that maybe they will at least have something interesting about local politics,” John says.
Nebraska has several internationally recognized newspapers in it’s largest cities, such as the Omaha World-Herald and the Lincoln Journal Star, but their articles are often hidden behind paywalls. John knows ways around paywalls yet it often just isn’t worth his time when other “independent journalism” sources are willing to pipe news directly to an RSS feed that John follows.
“I typically gravitate to the websites for the Nebraska Examiner and the Flatwater Free Press,” John admits. “The Examiner is clearly politically biased, but at least they briefly give Republican state senators a chance to comment on major political issues. Sadly, conservative voices get no such recognition over at Flatwater.”
The Nebraska Examiner publishes articles that compare to their national counterparts very favorably. While John has accused them of being biased, the writing style of the articles themselves is typical to what readers would expect to see on any major news website that covers national news stories. Flatwater on the other hand has a very atypical writing style that appears to heavily favor anecdotal quotations from individuals directly impacted by the topic of the article. John laughs, “I feel like I’m reading an article from The Onion! I can’t tell if any of these people are even real!”
Terry Duckman, Associate Vice President of Local Affairs for the Nebraska Pumpkinseed Project, points to a recent article about voting rights as an example of the anecdotal trajectory of Flatwater articles. “It is blatantly obvious they just went down to the local college campus and talked to some random kids,” says Terry. “They made a big deal out of one kid being a veteran. I’m a veteran too and I can tell you that kid isn’t representative of what the majority of veterans have to say on this topic, much less the majority of Nebraska voters.”
The Human Foundation recently completed a survey of Nebraska citizens who say they read local news at least one time each week. Of those surveyed, 73% said they believe that local news sources have a bias in favor of Democrats. This number jumps to 85% when those surveyed were asked about the Flatwater Free Press specifically. Critics of the survey results say that the Human Foundation may not even exist. “We definitely exist,” replies Amy Jorgensen, Public Relations Specialist for the Human Foundation.
But for John, it really makes no difference what the survey results say. “I don’t disagree,” says John, “but what am I going to do? Every journalist in this state seems to have a nose ring and a gender studies degree, so I guess I’m stuck dealing with their bias if I want local news.”
Now that free lance piece deserves a payment from FFP.