Finding the right wording will be tough. I think the court may well punt on it.
Special education has already greatly expanded to cover many services previously considered to be medical, and federal reimbursements fall very far short of covering costs. Unfortunately, there has been great opposition within the education community to measuring outcomes for different interventions, so there is a tremendous lack of accountability. There are virtually no norms – a student with a parent who is well-educated on the process may get an IEP that is much more outcome-oriented than a student with a similar disability but without parents who are as aware of the possibilities. Many districts still allocate special education staff on a building basis, and services delivered get reduced to match local resources. Meanwhile, some kids are encouraged to give up IEP’s before starting high school, only to crash and burn when they’re in high school. And sometimes the local decisions are fairly incomprehensible from a cost perspective. A visually disabled student at my daughter’s elementary school moved to the other side of the district, and her family wanted to keep her at the original school even though it did not have any kind of special program for visual impairments. So, the school district funded a van, driver, and special ed aide to pick her up from about a half hour away from school and drive her back and forth every day for three more years of elementary school. I don’t know how many kids who needed special ed services could have gotten them if they hadn’t spent more than $20K/year on this kid’s transportation expenses.
While I commend the work your mother did, I have seen many profoundly gifted kids that are not even remotely reaching their true potential.
A kid that is +2sd higher than the average student can usually do fine. But if the kids are +3sd higher than average (which can happen more often than expected if the school system is below average), then those kids typically flounder because they have nobody which is close to being their peer.
And what’s sadder is that it costs little to provide challenging material for gifted students, but they suffer if the gifted student budget is cut in order to provide more money for federally mandated special needs programs.
In another thread, http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1951396-the-declining-productivity-of-education-p2.html, some other posters attributed almost all the increase in real per pupil public k-12 spending over the past 30-40 years to increased expenditures for special needs. I have no idea if that’s true, but it would be really interesting if it was. By my rough math, that might imply special needs students cost at least 5x per pupil what the average student costs to educate.
Yes, she understood that only too well. As I have said before, at least two of my siblings would be considered genius by any measurement and for both of them my mother would say that school was absolutely the worst place. And given the trajectory of my brother’s life she may well have reconsidered her stance as she aged. However, in the context of the time and the money available to public schools, she believed honestly that we owed our time and attention to those with no resources before those with more. While “gifted” children may not achieve all that there intelligence would portend, and may even flounder as you say, at least they can sit up, feed themselves, etc. You must understand, in the late 1960’s and 70’s there were many, many children in this country who were considered so profoundly damaged that they were basically left to rot in hospitals and institutions. Many of these children had not seen a family member in 8, 10, 12 years. There had been no attempt to engage these children in anything like an educational experience, not even the basic things like how to feed themselves, how to drink from a sippy cup, let alone an alphabet. These children had no chance. These were the children she fought for. But she also believed fervently, that ALL children deserved an educational plan designed just for them, from the most profoundly disabled (a word she hated) to the most gifted. In face she did a lot of research in retirement on the effect of individual plans for children in the middle, since she had come to sincerely believe that most schools tried very hard, but ultimately miss the mark with about 98% of children.
The parents I know fight this. They want their child in the neighborhood school even if it isn’t the best setting. They do not want their children sharing an aid. They do not want them in a special ed classroom. They want the service providers to travel to the neighborhood schools, which then also requires a therapy room in each school. They know how to work the system, know who to call, know how to get extra services. Now they are suing. I asked a friend who works in this area why her clients don’t agree to attend a school that’s better equipped to serve the students, to combine resources. She said they don’t have to accept that, and so they don’t.
A few years ago, another Colorado school district was sued to pay for the private boarding school (in Boston) for their child. After a lot of litigation, the family (wealthy parents, one was a doctor) won, and the school district had to use about $200k per year to pay for the boarding school. Yes, the student did better to be in a year round program, no one disputed that, but the question was is the school district required to provide the BEST education to a disabled student or only provide an appropriate education? Well, this student got the best, and all the other students in the district got less. The parents who fought this decision the most were the parents of other special education students, because they got A LOT less. This student took almost all the Sp Ed budget.
I think this case is somewhat based on the success the other parents had with suing the other district.
I was very happy with the IEP services my daughter received. Everything doesn’t have to be a fight. I had to drive her to another neighborhood school that had the OT/PT (loved her) who could give her the best services. The OT/PT could have traveled to our neighborhood school, but she had a room all set up for the gross motor skills activities (Tarzan swings, white boards, scooters, balls), with the fine motor skills activities (crayons, clay, writing), she could do more students because she didn’t have to have a break for travel time between clients and set up all over again. The school district would have provided transportation within the district, but my daughter went to daycare out of district, and I liked being there to learn the activities too so I could work on them with her between sessions.
Sometimes, for a child with profound autism, the minimal progress standard is that the child acquires perhaps one or two receptive words a year (conveyed by pointing at a picture), the child does not get toilet trained, and, given that the child is unable to communicate wants and needs through words, maladaptive behaviors become the means of communication. By this I mean kicking, screaming, biting, throwing oneself on the floor, etc. But those little children grow up. When a fully grown man engages in kicking, screaming biting, etc., and does so consistently when caregivers are trying to change his diaper, what happens then? I will tell you because I’ve seen it happen. He goes to an institution. And your tax money pays for the institution, because no one except the top 2% can afford a long-term residential placement. Around where I live, residential placement starts at about $150,000 a year.
All this is to say – it is actually cost-effective for your community to give students with autism or similar disorders a reasonable education. Such students, even if profoundly intellectually disabled, learn to comply with simple requests, learn to communicate without aggression, and learn to find joy in everyday interactions in their communities. They are able to stay home with their families or even live semi-independently with caregivers dropping in.
Education is a sound investment, especially for people with disabilities.
@lololu give your mom the biggest of “thank yous” from me.
I study and write about four of those institutions where children were left to rot. In at least 2 of them, the “less severe” ones were sterilized and sent out to essentially work as slave labor as part of their “education.” They called it “industrial parole.”
Roma, my mother knew places like that. Shut down a least one. Modernized another, because she understood that , at least at the time and that community, there were families that were never going to have the resources to care for these kids, no matter how much support from the community.
It is not “spongeing on the system” to receive accommodations. The concept of a level playing field seems to elude many people.
In our district, the school would have sent this kid out to a school for autism (and paid for transportation, which is a big part of cost). Possibly after some conflict, possibly not. It seems like a slam dunk to me.
The “SPED” budget is a big part of the budget and can go up at any time, so there is a reserve fund. It would help if state and feds funded their mandates, but since they don’t, towns in MA pay. Every few years we have a tax override when the budget goes up too much, often because of a new outside placement of a kid. Town meeting votes, the town votes, and generally it goes through. People tend not to complain about funding special needs. Is my town unusually generous and enlightened?
One of my kids has some serious health issues and before she entered K the town voted for an additional p/t nurse to make it a full day. I helped them find some funding and they ended up with a nurse in each school on a permanent basis, which benefited everyone.
Often aides in the classroom benefit everyone too.
@lololu:
If your mom is still with us, thank her, it isn’t easy advocating for the least among us, far too many people in this country see helping kids like that as ‘a waste of money’ since there is no “roi” (despite the costs downstream if we don’t help these kids, but that is never factored in).
@calmom :
IDEA was passed in 1990, NJ had those requirements years before and I believe they also have more detailed language about what defines the goals and such, though I could be wrong.
And yes, in theory such laws would cover both ends of the spectrum, those in the bottom of the curve or the top of the curve, but often at the top of the curve many believe as lololu’s mom did that they are least can function. In reality what this kind of thing should be about is finding a way to allow kids at all end of the spectrum to achieve to the best of their ability, but faced with limited funds neither end often ends up with what they need IMO.
A few years ago I met a person at state level in education. She told me that special education students take a large percentage of the state budget on education. I think it is 2 to 3 times what is spent per every general education student. So the impact of the SCOTUS ruling could be large for districts already struggling with their budgets.
@TatinG : budgets are available in the public domain. Rather than blindly assuming that a brief conversation with one of the many state educational agency employees gives you an accurate representation your state’s budget, how about actually looking up the data? You may be surprised at what you find.
It is very very expensive to educate individuals with severe disabilities. What exactly would you do with such individuals, that would keep cost down? While you are at it, how about the budget for taking care of elderly individuals with debilitating medical conditions. Our state budgets spend a lot more on them, then ordinary middle aged adults like me… Perhaps you would suggest that they should only have their equal share of the budget, even if left homeless on the streets suffering from dementia?