Lisa Ledson took two days off work this week to go to the Oregon Capitol and buttonhole any lawmaker she could find, part of a frantic, last-ditch attempt to save a bill that would force Oregon schools to stop excluding children with severe behavior issues or complex medical needs from full-time school.

It didn’t work.

Senate Bill 819 was supposed to get a vote in the House on Thursday. Instead, without discussion, legislators in that chamber sent it back to the House Rules Committee where, barring a miracle, it is likely to die, said the bill’s chief sponsor Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D-Corvallis.

Ledson, an emergency room nurse from West Linn, is the parent of 11-year-old twin girls, one of whom, Hannah, has cerebral palsy and eats through a feeding tube.

Ledson said she and her husband, a firefighter at Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue, frequently got calls from Hannah’s school, Cedaroak Park Primary, letting them know their daughter had vomited at lunch and needed to be taken home.

Heartsick, they finally withdrew her from the school and began home-schooling, and then took her twin sister, Kate, out too.

It was too painful, Ledson said, to see her typically developing daughter head out the door to be with her friends while her other daughter stayed behind, wishing she could go too.

Senate Bill 819 could have helped her daughter and the nearly 1,000 other children around Oregon who’ve been subject to such curtailed school days, some of them allowed to attend for only a few hours each week, she said.

The bill would have required that school districts get sign-off from parents before reducing the time a child spends in school. Parents who agree to limited hours could later demand their children be restored to full-time school in 10 days or less.

Districts that fail to comply could lose some or all state funding for the costs of educating that pupil. The bill also would require districts to inform the Oregon Department of Education about how many of their students are consigned to shortened school days, how many hours of class-time they receive and any planned return date to full-time school.

Oregon’s poor track record on the issue landed the state on the front page of The New York Times earlier this year, and Gelser Blouin and parent advocates were initially hopeful that the bill had momentum.

Now it’s just one of many significant policy bills in limbo given the stalemate at the Oregon Senate, where neither Democrats nor

Republicans will budge on negotiations over a handful of contentious bills, leading to a work stoppage by the GOP.

Additionally, from the outset, the bill faced pushback from the school administrators, school boards and school employees whose advocacy holds great sway in Salem.

Those groups said abiding by the bill’s requirements would be prohibitively expensive at a time when the ranks of special educators are thinning.

“We are gravely concerned that school districts will not have resources to support students with the highest need,” Susan Allen, a government relations specialist with the Oregon School Employees Association, which represents the paraeducators who often are assigned to be one-on-one aides to high-need students, told members of the House Education Committee at a hearing in May. “Currently, Oregon is at critical staffing levels in virtually all school districts. We do not have enough people to do the work now.”

Gelser Blouin, who has a son with development delays, isn’t buying it.

“With record investments in public schools, it is unthinkable that we are making zero progress on this issue,” she said, referring to the approximately $15 billion forecasted for schools in the next two years from a combination of state general fund dollars, corporate taxes, federal money and local property taxes.

“It’s even more disheartening to know that as they do this, we are sending districts millions of dollars in full-time revenue generated directly by kids who are denied access.”

Statewide, around 1,000 children in 84 school districts have been removed from full-time school, according to data from the Oregon Department of Education.

Five districts have more than 25 children attending school on abbreviated schedules, including 48 at Salem-Keizer, 36 in Medford, 30 at Portland Public Schools, 28 in Springfield and 27 in Grants Pass.

Those districts received about $21,000 per student to cover the costs of educating those residents of their districts, even if they attend school for only a few hours a week, according to state data.

If Senate Bill 819 does die, Gelser Blouin warned Thursday, Oregon could be on the hook for a much costlier solution. A class action lawsuit filed by Disability Rights Oregon and a federal advocacy group is making its way through the federal court system.

In similar cases elsewhere, Gelser Blouin said, states have had to pay for make-up class time and for psychological treatment to help with emotional distress — and that’s not even considering the missed wages for parents like Ledson, who said she has had to put her career on hold to home-school her girls.

Ledson said she’s not giving up hope. She wants both of her daughters to go back to their school in the fall, with a trained nursing professional to help Hannah at lunch so she can eat safely, just as she does at home.

“This impacts my children’s lives immensely,” she said. “They cannot go to school with their friends. They are being isolated.”