Special Education Enrollment by Disability

District-level headcounts of students in special education by the 17 IDEA disability categories, from the October FTE count, 2014-2026.

Source: Georgia Insights (GaDOE)
Year coverage: 2014–2026
Updated: annual
Version: 3.0.0
Schema hash: 12b4db534db4

Detail levels available

District · default

Overview

Georgia Insights (GaDOE) FTE Enrollment by Disability — the October Cycle 1 FTE headcount of Georgia public school students receiving special-education services, broken out by the 17 GaDOE/IDEA disability categories (autism, specific learning disability, speech-language impairment, etc.) at the school-district level, fiscal years 2014-2026. District-only: the source publishes no state aggregate and no school-level rows. Counts below 10 are suppressed to NULL by the source's small-cell rule.

Row grain: One row per year, district_code, school_code, demographic.

Key metric

num_students — Number Students (count)

The single headline value most answers want.

JSON schema →Data contract (YAML) →

Variables

Every column in the fact table. The code is the exact field name the API returns.

Column	Type	Unit	Range	Null?	Description
`year`Year	integer	—	—	no	Fiscal year of the October FTE count (2026 = October 2025, i.e. the 2025-2026 school year). Sourced from the bronze filename, cross-checked against each file's preamble. Full description▾ Fiscal year of the October FTE count (2026 = October 2025, i.e. the 2025-2026 school year). Sourced from the bronze filename, cross-checked against each file's preamble.
`district_code`District Code	string	—	—	no	3-digit GOSA district code (zero-padded) for standard districts; 7-digit code for state charters and specialty schools, including the 2014-2019 pseudo-districts 7991893/7991894/7991895 for the three state schools (published with blank names by the source; named in the districts dimension). Never NULL — this topic has no state-level rows. FK to districts dimension. Full description▾ 3-digit GOSA district code (zero-padded) for standard districts; 7-digit code for state charters and specialty schools, including the 2014-2019 pseudo-districts 7991893/7991894/7991895 for the three state schools (published with blank names by the source; named in the districts dimension). Never NULL — this topic has no state-level rows. FK to districts dimension. Joins districts; adds its label columns.
`school_code`School Code	string	—	—	yes	Always NULL — GaDOE publishes this disability breakdown at the district level only. The column is kept so every education fact table shares the same key-column shape. Full description▾ Always NULL — GaDOE publishes this disability breakdown at the district level only. The column is kept so every education fact table shares the same key-column shape. Joins schools; adds its label columns.
`demographic`Demographic	string	—	—	no	One of 17 IDEA disability categories (e.g. autism, specific learning disability); no `all` total row. Full description▾ Primary exceptionality — the GaDOE/IDEA disability category (FK to the global demographics dimension's 'disability' demographic_category). One of 17 snake_case values mapped 1:1 from the bronze code columns (AUT -> autism, SLD -> specific_learning_disability, HH -> hard_of_hearing, ...). HH is Hard of Hearing / Hearing Impairment (GaDOE FTE program code W), the sibling of D -> deaf (code X) — not Hospital/Homebound, which is a placement, not a disability category. BL -> blind is GaDOE's Blind primary area (FTE code 1; the report legend reads 'BL = Blind'); students with low vision / visual impairment are the separate visual_impairment bucket (VI, code Z), so blind excludes them. Every row's population is students receiving special-education services, split by their single primary disability. This topic publishes only the 17 disability categories at the district level — there is no 'all' total row (the source publishes none). 17 allowed values▾ `autism` `blind` `deaf` `deaf_blind` `emotional_behavioral_disorder` `hard_of_hearing` `mild_intellectual_disability` `moderate_intellectual_disability` `orthopedic_impairment` `other_health_impairment` `profound_intellectual_disability` `severe_intellectual_disability` `significant_developmental_delay` `specific_learning_disability` `speech_language_impairment` `traumatic_brain_injury` `visual_impairment` Joins demographics; adds its label columns.
`num_students`Number Students	integer	count	—	yes	Count of special-education students in the disability category; NULL means suppressed by the source's small-cell rule (true count below 10, possibly zero) — the source never publishes a 0. Full description▾ FTE headcount of students served in the disability category for the (year, district) cell. Raw count, not scaled. NULL means the source suppressed the cell (''): the true count is below 10 and may be zero — GaDOE publishes no literal 0 in any year, so '' covers both zero and 1-9. Every published value is >= 10 (verified in every column of every year).

Filters

Query parameters the fact endpoint accepts. Comma-separated values are OR within a parameter; multiple parameters AND together.

Parameter	Kind	Allowed values	Notes
`year`	year_exact	any value	—
`year_min`	year_range	any value	—
`year_max`	year_range	any value	—
`detail`	detail	`districts`	enum-enforced, default: districts
`district_code`	foreign_key	any value	multi-value
`school_code`	foreign_key	any value	multi-value
`demographic`	foreign_key	17 allowed values▾ `autism` `blind` `deaf` `deaf_blind` `emotional_behavioral_disorder` `hard_of_hearing` `mild_intellectual_disability` `moderate_intellectual_disability` `orthopedic_impairment` `other_health_impairment` `profound_intellectual_disability` `severe_intellectual_disability` `significant_developmental_delay` `specific_learning_disability` `speech_language_impairment` `traumatic_brain_injury` `visual_impairment`	multi-value, enum-enforced
`district_type`	dimension_attribute	7 allowed values▾ `commission_charter` `resa` `standard` `state_agency` `state_charter` `state_school` `state_special`	multi-value, enum-enforced
`school_level`	dimension_attribute	`elementarymiddlehighk12other`	multi-value, enum-enforced
`locale`	dimension_attribute	`citysuburbtownrural`	multi-value, enum-enforced
`demographic_category`	dimension_attribute	12 allowed values▾ `aggregate` `disability` `economic_status` `esol` `foster_care` `gender` `grade` `homeless_status` `migrant_status` `military` `race` `sped`	multi-value, enum-enforced

Example requests

Run these against the base URL — they return live data.

All rows (first page), districts level

curl "https://georgiacivicdata.org/api/v1/education/enrollment_october_disability"

districts data for 2026

curl "https://georgiacivicdata.org/api/v1/education/enrollment_october_disability?year=2026"

One district (code 601), 2026

curl "https://georgiacivicdata.org/api/v1/education/enrollment_october_disability?district_code=601&year=2026&detail=districts"

Download 2026 as CSV

curl "https://georgiacivicdata.org/api/v1/education/enrollment_october_disability?year=2026&format=csv"

Notes & limitations

NULL handling

Suppressed cells (too few students to report) are NULL, never zero.
Zero is a real, reported value.

Limitations

Suppressed cells are NULL, never 0: the source's small-cell rule withholds every count below 10, so a NULL means 'fewer than 10, possibly zero' — GaDOE publishes no literal 0 in any year ('*' is the only marker), so zero_is_real stays true (a 0, if one were ever published, would be a real count) and every published value is >= 10. District rows have NULL school_code. District-only topic: the source publishes no state-aggregate row and no school-level file, so summing district rows is the only way to approximate a state figure — and that sum undercounts, because every suppressed cell (below 10) contributes nothing. deaf_blind is 100% suppressed in every year (no Georgia district ever reports 10+ deaf-blind FTE students), so its num_students is always NULL — the rows are kept to preserve the complete 17-category block. Despite 'by Grade Disability' in the source filenames, the files contain no per-grade breakdown — only district x disability category. The three state schools (district codes 7991893, 7991894, 7991895; blank names in bronze, named in the districts dimension) appear only in 2014-2019 and drop out of the report from 2020, so a district-sum series that includes them shifts at 2020.