Twenty-eight new rooms

In 2021, Denver Public Schools had 1,315 autistic students receiving special education services. Last year it had 2,280. That is an increase of nearly 75% in five years, in a district where overall enrolment is falling.

The district's answer, reported by Chalkbeat Colorado and KUNC, has been to build rooms. Twenty-eight new autism classrooms in two years, officially called multi-intensive autism center-based programs. Each one typically serves eight to twelve students, with up to four adults. Each one costs more than $230,000.

I want to say clearly at the start: I am not against those rooms. Some children need a smaller, calmer, more intensely staffed place for some or all of the day, and a district that builds them is taking those children seriously. Denver is doing something, under real financial pressure, and that deserves credit.

But I keep coming back to one number, and it is not 28.

The room that didn't change

The number is the one nobody reports: how many of the other classrooms changed over the same five years.

When numbers rise like this, the instinct in almost every system is the same. We add a separate place at the end of the line. It is visible, it can be counted, it can be opened with a ribbon. What is much harder to count is whether the ordinary classroom, the one most autistic children will spend most of their school lives in, became any easier to be in.

Experts quoted in the coverage put much of the rise down to better screening and a wider definition. In other words, these children were mostly always there. What has changed is that we can now see them. If that is true, the question is not only “where do we put them?” It is “what were they already struggling with, in rooms that were never designed with them in mind?”

Chalkbeat also notes that placement in a center-based program is decided by each student's special education team, and that the district began seeing more of these placements about three years ago. A placement is a decision about a child. A rising number of placements is information about the rooms they are being placed out of.

Why this is an Irish story too

Denver is not Dublin or Waterford, and I don't want to borrow American numbers to make an Irish point. But the shape is familiar. Each year we hear about new special classes and new special school places, and each year we are told how many more we will need. Those places matter, and families fight hard for them.

What we hear far less about is the mainstream classroom: the sensory load of the corridor, the noise of the canteen, the timetable that changes without warning, the lesson that only has one way in and one way to show what you know. Those are not features of any child. They are features of the environment, and environments can be redesigned.

Three questions for every new room

So when the next announcement comes, here or anywhere, I would like us to ask three things alongside “how many places?”:

• For every new specialist place, what changed in the mainstream rooms in the same school, and who is responsible for it?

• Are children moving between the specialist room and mainstream classes in both directions, or does a placement quietly become permanent?

• If a specialist room costs what Denver's do, what would a fraction of that buy in the ordinary classroom: training, quieter spaces, visual timetables, flexible ways to learn and show learning, for every child who needs them, with or without a label?

None of those questions is an argument against specialist provision. They are an argument against letting it become the only thing that changes.

Change the environment, not the child

Universal Design for Learning starts from a simple idea: design for the full range of learners from the beginning, so fewer children have to be moved, fixed or sent somewhere else to cope. When a room needs four adults to work, it is worth asking what it would take for the next room down the corridor to need fewer.

Twenty-eight new rooms is a response. The real measure is how many of the old ones became places where those children could have stayed.

Sources: Chalkbeat Colorado, “Denver district opens more specialized classrooms amid a rise in the number of students with autism”, 22 September 2026 — chalkbeat.org; KUNC, 2 October 2026 — kunc.org. Figures are as reported by those outlets.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.