<p><a href=“http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/741911293.html[/url]”>http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/741911293.html</a></p>
<p>The mother of a 14 year old UCLA junior is suing the high school district to pay for his UCLA tuition. Does a student deserves a free college education based on his age. What would be the implication if this becomes the law? How would it affects the college plans of your children?</p>
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<p>I’d say yes. According to state law, he must be in school, otherwise he is in violation of the law. The school district is not spending funds educating him in high school. He is entitled, even mandated to be educated. It just happens that " being inschool" in his case means being at university–public university.</p>
<p>Well said Marite. If he were above the truancy age, this would be a different situation. And I wonder, if he were a special education student with an IOP would you have the same objections? After all, it “costs” more to educate students at both ends of the spectrum.</p>
<p>I would venture to guess the state law applies only to a K-12 education, so beyond that sorry buddy. </p>
<p>While government has a duty to provide for a post hs education, they haven’t an obligation to pay for it. </p>
<p>What I am wondering if the kid’s so “gul darn intelergent” what are his test scores and where are the acedemic scholarships? </p>
<p>And getting an okie dokie from a physcologist isn’t or doesn’t mean anything as the general population tests for college enterance to most schools. What are his test scores?</p>
<p>I think the current system of dividing kids up in school grades by age is wrong-headed. </p>
<p><a href=“http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html[/url]”>http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html</a> </p>
<p>If it’s really of benefit to society to have taxpayers spring for the education of all young people, wouldn’t it be most beneficial to have that education take the form that allows each learner to reach his maximum potential?</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure the young person mentioned in the news article previously attended a community college, and transfered to his current college after that, but I may be mixing up different news stories. I am sure that this young person is the same person I heard about a few years ago on National Public Radio. It’s an interesting case.</p>
<p>In California and many other states, a student who has graduated from high school is exempt from compulsory attendance requirements, regardless of age.</p>
<p>I assume, therefore, that he has not actually graduated from high school, but most likely has taken the CHSPE (California High School Proficiency Exam, a sort of GED alternative without the stigma some people associate with a GED.)</p>
<p>In that case, he will be subject to mandatory attendance until he either (a) graduates from high school in the conventional way or (b) turns 18 or (c) turns 16 and his parents give permission for him to stop attending school.</p>
<p>The courts have established that students are entitled to a “free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment,” but they are reluctant to overrule school administrators’ judgments and micromanage exact details of exactly what that education should be. </p>
<p>A judge might find that the boy is entitled to college-level work, but the school district might argue that the public high school can offer him such work in the regular public school building, perhaps through distance-learning, or college classes offered in the high school, or independent study or research with a mentor.</p>
<p>It might not be what his parents want, but such accommodations could well satisfy a judge.</p>
<p>(By the same token, parents might want their autistic child to go to a specialized private school, but if the school district argues that he is making adequate progress in the regular public school with an aide and pull-out time in the resource room, the judge may well buy the district’s argument.)</p>
<p>Entitlement to a “free and appropriate public education” does not necessarily mean a “free and optimal” public education, simply a free and adequate public education.</p>
<p>And “least restrictive environment” generally means keeping a child with his age peers, not his intellectual or academic peers.</p>
<p>I could certainly see a judge ordering the child’s public school district to make some special accommodations for him in this case, but not necessarily the ones he and his parents have chosen (i.e., paying for him to attend UCLA.)</p>
<p>On the other hand, it’s probably a lot cheaper to pay for the kid to go to UCLA than to pay the lawyers to fight the case (on either side!)</p>
<p>My son almost started college at a public college at the age of 14. Here in Washington, he would have received financial support from the state to the amount that a public high school would have received, up to the year his “class” would graduate high school. The program he would have been in actually cost more than the standard state HS expense, so we would have been responsible for the difference. It’s a policy that makes sense to me. (I may have munged the details, but it is essentially correct as I remember it from four years ago.)</p>
<p>IF the child is entitled to tuition, the STATE can choose the school, NOT the parent. This means they can put the kid in an appropriate Cal State school OR community college & NOT the flagship UCLA at state expense.<br>
In HI also, I believe that if the child gets a HS degree or GED, the child no longer has to attend school (but haven’t checked).</p>
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<p>Certainly, this is the case for parents of disabled children, as I mentioned above. In general, they don’t get to choose the facility their children will attend.</p>
<p>On the other hand, it is interesting to note that paying tuition at UCLA might well be cheaper than the average cost per student at a regular public high school in LA.</p>
<p>It’s easy to see why this could be so–high schools have to provide supervision for students 30 hours a week, generally with a much smaller student-teacher ratio than colleges. Colleges don’t have to hire hall monitors and cafeteria monitors. Colleges can put kids in large lecture halls with a single professor, much bigger than any high school would use. Colleges can hire very inexpensive labor (adjuncts or graduate TAs with no benefits and low pay rates.) High school teachers may not be getting paid munificently, but they do get benefits and higher annual salaries than adjuncts or TAs. </p>
<p>So the district might actually save money if they encouraged all the precocious students to attend college instead of high school.</p>
<p>our state does have early entrance at colleges- but some students are doing a combination of online- community college and courses at high school</p>
<p>but for someone who was reading high school books at 5
university seems more more appropriate and why wouldn’t the university jump at the chance to have him enroll?</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.learningcommons.org/parents/courses/[/url]”>http://www.learningcommons.org/parents/courses/</a></p>
<p>I think the question is can the parents FORCE the state to pay tuition at the U of the parents/student’s choosing? I think not & can see no reason that state should be forced to fund whatever the student & parents decide for the student’s education. I see no reason that precocious students should be able to force this – there is no mandate that I’m aware of that guarantees them this.</p>
<p>Back to another point - are there no scholarships, etc that the child recieve? our local commuter uni had a prodigy child a few years ago - I think he was about 12 years old and a junior perhaps - I’m pretty sure his tuition was free, all that free publicity the uni got about the kid was worth the tuition.</p>
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<p>Well, there you go. K-12 costs MORE than UCLA - send em’ all to UCLA! ;).</p>
<p>I think there is more here than meets the eye.</p>
<p>About 12 years ago my (then 14-year-old) high IQ nephew was sponsored by LAUSD into a program where he skipped HS and had his tuition paid to go to Cal State LA (not to be confused with UCLA). There were about a dozen kids in this program. He finished his BA in Engilish Literature a month before his 18th birthday, all paid for by LAUSD.</p>
<p>They had strings attached. He was required to maintain a 3.0 GPA and carry full (15 units). Failure to do so resulted in return to HS, with all college credit converted to HS credit. Not that he had a problem. I think I could count the B’s he got on 1 hand.</p>
<p>I don’t know if they still run such a program, but if they do, I don’t know why this isn’t a slam dunk for the district. You just have to play by the rules (go to college where they say), if you want a “free” public education.</p>
<p>I think asking the district to pay for UCLA may be stretching it a bit. What next? Stanford?</p>
<p>That being said, if the district policy is to pay for a Cal State, and the kid’s parents want UCLA, I say settle it for contributing the Cal State tuition to his UCLA account.</p>
<p>In a perfect world, we’d all love our kids to go to the best school they can qualify for, but I don’t see a harm to the child in LAUSD paying for him to attend a Cal State.</p>
<p>I think as a point of principle, the student should not be asked to rely on scholarships, which he might well get. The principle is that the state is mandating school attendance up to age 16 or 18. The kid is 14. The school district may decide that it does not want to pay for UCLA (although it is indeed cheaper than having him educated in a k-12 setting) but he has already attended community college, and presumably, exhausted its facilities.
We do not, actually, know that online college courses are available in every subjects and at appropriate levels; nor do we know that they would be cheaper than attending UCLA. </p>
<p>When my S was in high school, we found that the Harvard Extension School did not meet his needs in every subject and had to work very hard for him to audit regular classes in some subjects. He’d already taken AP-Calc and AP Phyiscs in 8th grade but was required to take a mimimum of 3 years of math in order to graduate from high school. The level was not stipulated, but the school knew better than to ask him to sit through AP-Calc for three addditional years. But we were extremely lucky that profs were willing to allow this non-paying student to sit in their classes. </p>
<p>If the state decreed that all students must be educated up to 12th grade, it would be a different issue.</p>
<p>This student is currently 16 years old and has been enrolled at UCLA since he was 13; his mother has been fighting legal battles since at least age 10–here’s a story from 2002, when he was 11:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/07/eveningnews/main524577.shtml[/url]”>http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/07/eveningnews/main524577.shtml</a></p>
<p>He took the CHSPE at age 10 and enrolled as a student at a community college at 11. He transferred to UCLA as a premed student at age 13, almost three years ago. I would imagine he would be done with college by now. If he graduates from college before he reaches the end of compulsory attendance at 18, should the state also be required to pay for medical school?</p>
<p>The amount of money the school district has spent on lawyers and the court system dealing with this case surely exceeds what it would have cost just to pay college tuition all along.</p>
<p>The broader principle is complex. There is currently an expensive due-process bureaucracy set up to preserve the rights of students with disabilities to a free and appropriate education. </p>
<p>The student’s mother has apparently filed legal arguments to the effect that being “highly gifted” constitutes a disability and that the student should therefore be entitled to the rights afforded disabled students under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA.)</p>
<p>Extending IDEA rights to all “highly gifted students” could potentially be very expensive. It’s not just about paying tuition, but about all the due process bureaucracy involved in ruling on it.</p>
<p>In a state like California, with severe budget constraints on K-12 education, I can understand why the school district would be reluctant to fund a larger bureaucratic structure to deal with IEPs for gifted kids, including the right for any student whose parents believe he is unhappy at school and can pass the CHSPE to attend college at district expense. </p>
<p>And I can see why the courts would be reluctant to open up the Pandora’s box set of issues involved here.</p>
<p>Ideally, schools and families shoud be able to sit down informally as marite’s family did and work out plans to meet students’ needs as well as possible, given local resources.</p>
<p>I feel sorry for the student, growing up at the center of all these very public legal battles.</p>
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<p>The state has essentially done this. Students who graduate from 12th grade are exempt from compulsory attendance laws.</p>
<p>The problem is that the student did not graduate from 12th grade in the conventional way. If he had graduated from 12th grade by accelerating through K-12 and earning a high school diploma by accruing the necessary number of high school credits, he would be exempt from compulsory attendance.</p>
<p>Instead, he took the CHSPE, which is considered to be the substantial equivalent of 12th grade graduation for the purposes of college matriculation, but it’s not considered to be the substantial equivalent of 12th grade graduation for the purposes of exemption from compulsory attendance.</p>
<p>(Ironically, the CHSPE is supposedly more difficult than the California State High School Exit Exam, which conventional graduates must pass!)</p>
<p>If the public hs cannot meet the student’s need I see no reason why the district should not pay the college tuition, academic fees and transportation costs just as they do for special needs students. </p>
<p>I do think that the school district should be able to choose the college it is sending that student to, be it a local community college or local 4 yr college. Just because the student would like to attend a highly selective college hundreds of miles away does’t mean that the school district should have to pay the additional costs for tuition, r&B, and transportation.</p>
<p>Wisteria:</p>
<p>Thanks for posting that link.</p>
<p>A huge element of luck is involved. If my S had been required to attend our state uni, it would have been a logistical nightmare. And a cc would have been even worse. I don’t know whether we could have managed.
Kids in the Boston area use the Harvard Extension school as their local community college. But it has limited offerings. S has a friend from the suburbs who was allowed to audit a daytime class at H. We have not found out how he, his family, and his high school coped with the far greater disruption involved in his taking that class.
We have encountered a number of profoundly gifted kids over the last few years. One particular kid I remember was preparing for her A levels at 11. Another kid was doing advanced college math and physics, also at 11. Both were homeschooled.</p>