Providers denounce Education delays in paying Provisional Remedy

On July 24, 2026, NotiCel reports that the Puerto Rican Association of Health and Education-Related Service Providers denounces that the Department of Education is keeping Provisional Remedy services already billed unpaid, outside the 30-day term. If it is not corrected, the statement says, between August 1 and 10 the debt will equal two months of services rendered and not paid, with the school year about to begin and without guarantees of normality.

Ruth Concepción Rivera, APPSSRE president, asserts that one month of nonpayment is already a crisis and that two months, with the term starting, is unsustainable. It is not an isolated failure, she says, but years of administrative and fiscal omissions. The association holds that the budget has not been set according to the Program's real operating expense and that line items are missing for a cost the Department itself knows is recurring. Today more than 69,000 therapy services are owed, a figure that does not even include compensatory therapies or the limits on access to evaluations.

Education, they denounce, has not offered providers official information on the collection mechanism under the new billing process or whether they will have to take additional steps for invoices already submitted. Ruth Concepción Rivera insists that the duty to guarantee access is the Department's, not the provider's, and that the State cannot shift to the private sector a responsibility that is its own. Providers, she says, do not have to go to the Financial Oversight Board or Hacienda to claim payment of a service that a court ordered precisely because the State did not offer it in the first instance.

On July 27, Radio Isla will cover that the Office of Management and Budget confirms the start of payments and a disbursement of about $200 million to the Department, plus $45 million under Board custody. On the 31st, NotiCel will report that Eliezer Ramos Parés will present to the Board a debt of about $12.6 million. Three dates, three amounts. This one covers the denunciation of the 69,000 services. It is not used to square the $200 million or the $12.6.

APPSSRE speaks; Education does not answer in this piece. The reader who wants the statement has the NotiCel URL at the foot. This is not original reporting.

Source: NotiCel. https://noticel.com/ultima-hora/20260724/denuncian-atrasos-en-el-pago-de-servicios-a-estudiantes-de-educacion-especial/