For almost five months, the minister of education — first Gerard Kennedy, then Sandra Pupatello — has been sitting on a key report about the future of special education in the province of Ontario.

The report was prepared by a government-appointed task force called the "Working table on Special Education Reform," which was made up of representatives of school boards, teachers, principals, parents and others.

It was submitted to Kennedy on Jan. 4 with a covering letter from co-chairs Kathleen Wynne, Kennedy's parliamentary assistant, and Sheila Bennett, assistant professor of education at Brock University, urging that it be released forthwith.

"We believe that it is time now for these ideas to be shared with school and education communities around the province," said Wynne and Bennett in their letter. "The recommendations of the working table need to be aired publicly. Response and feedback through broader public engagement will complement the report and serve to help and support you to formulate a solid strategy."

Special education is the catch-all label for some $2 billion in school programs for children with various degrees of learning disabilities. The government is alarmed because spending on these programs is growing at a much faster rate than the overall education budget.

Parents, meanwhile, are either angry that their kids have been wrongly labelled or frustrated that the promised help for them is not being delivered.

Reform would seem to be long overdue.

But Kennedy, his mind perhaps already drifting to another arena, sat on the report until his resignation from cabinet on April 5 to run for the federal Liberal leadership. Pupatello, Kennedy's successor, has been sitting on it since then.

What explains the delay?

I asked Ben Levin, deputy minister of education, that question last week. He first tried to claim that the report submitted Jan. 4 was a "draft" that required more work. But nothing in the covering letter or in the report itself (a copy of which I have obtained) suggests it is a draft.

The working table was reconvened for a meeting on May 1 to discuss the report, but participants in that meeting say that only minor changes in wording were made to it.

Levin then offered this explanation for the delay in the report's release: "Other things intervened, other pressures, and it just didn't happen."

I think the real explanation for the delay is that one of the core recommendations in the report would result in some school boards getting more provincial funding for special education, leaving others with much less. That is the sort of controversy that makes education ministers nervous.

The report does not list the winners and losers.

But at the May 1 working table meeting, a breakdown of the impact of the funding recommendation on various representative boards was distributed. However, participants were required to hand it back at the end of the meeting.

What the working table has recommended is the scrapping of the onerous system of identification and documentation of "high needs" special education kids, which was imposed by the previous Conservative government.

The concern is that the system not only diverted educators away from classrooms to paperwork, but also acted as an incentive for school boards to over-identify high-needs kids in order to get the provincial funding.

The province pays the boards $27,000 for each identified high-needs child, about three times the amount for average kids.

Neil Cuddy, a parent whose son was identified as a high-needs kid by the Toronto public board, told a legislative committee last week that the system effectively "put a bounty of $27,000 on each child who could be diagnosed."

The boards deny this, but the figures would seem to speak for themselves: from 2001 to 2004, the number of high-needs kids in Ontario doubled to 54,000.

In place of the old system, the working table recommends that each board henceforth be given block grants based on the incidence of high-needs kids in their systems this school year.

That would remove the incentive for boards to continue identifying more and more high-needs kids, but it would not deal with the second half of the special education problem: ensuring that the programs are actually delivered to the kids who need them.

The working table report is sketchier on this aspect.

Among other things, it recommends customized report cards, improved training for teachers, better communication with parents, and "cyclical reviews" of school boards to ensure the money is being well spent.

Sketchy or not, the report is a start to a debate on the reform of the system. The sooner it is released the better.