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> I suspect Salt Lake City has a much lower amount of special needs students.

But one could assume the ratio stays the same, and thus so does the average (modulo the notes of other commenters e.g. cost of living).

That however might not be the case, for various reasons cultural (does one population tend to homeschool special needs children more?) and "technical" (do parents of special ed children go to big cities for treatment/infrastructure?).

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Anecdote: I suspect if you're the parent of a special needs kid and you're not filthy rich and you want to have access to the best specialists and, frankly, access to other special needs kids then it makes sense to move to the East Coast. This may be changing but for a long time East Coast schools were the only place where your kid could spend any quality time with an autism specialist. Part of it, I think, is just the fact that a lot of the research and the teaching colleges happen to be on the East Coast so there's a kind of knowledge community effect at work and this leads to better infrastructure. It's a situation where you need all the help you can get.

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