Feds Loosen Rules On Cutting Special Ed. Spending

Education Week:

School districts that want to reduce special education spending from one year to the next without restoring what was cut now have the blessing of the U.S. Department of Education.

In the past, federal law was interpreted to mean that once a district set its special education budget, it could not be reduced permanently except for very specific reasons.

Read the whole story: Education Week

Comments

[HockeyMom]

02:59 PM on 09/01/2011

In Michigan we spend over $80,000 a year on special ed kids and this comes out of the AVERAGE spent on the rest of the children.

[bdazz]

08:04 AM on 09/01/2011

The children in wheelchairs who have to be fed and diapered should have a nurse with them at all times. The kids I worked with always had a nurse. As for the others who disrupt mainstream classes they too should have an assistant..a one on one who guides them in their regular ed classes as so they won't disrupt the rest of the students..as funding goes south..these resources will dry up and no one will get the quality education they deserve. Sad.

[megwright]

01:42 AM on 09/01/2011

Twelve years ago our city decided to add a "severe" special ed class for students who were so disabled they'd never had the opportunity to go to school. My daughter-in-law was hired to teach the class. She has an average of seven students, all of whom need to be tube fed at lunchtime and all of whom must be toileted or diapered three times a day. She was supposed to have three paras, but budget cuts leave her only two. All of her students throughout the years were in wheelchairs, with the exception of one who was brought to school on a gurney every day.

None of these high school students had ever been able to communicate orally. My daughter-in-law's has a Master's in Special Ed.; her expertise was computer adaptation. If a student couldn't move any part of the body, the adaptation consisted of arranging for them to operate a computer by blowing into a straw. If a student could move a little finger, the computer was adapted for that movement. That opportunity opened up a whole new world for the students to finally be able to communicate by typing their thoughts into the computer. They lighted up with delight, and the result of being able to communicate with their children at that level brought most of their parents to tears.

[OliveColored]

10:56 AM on 09/01/2011

One of the most impressive people I've ever met in my life was a paraplegic computer programmer, who wrote entirely by a device he kept in his mouth.

[freethinking moderate]

09:52 PM on 08/31/2011

Its a sad reality that mainstreaming special ed kids into classes that lack the educational support that these children truly need is seriously undermining public education and doing little for the students who are mainstreamed. I understand the desire of parents who want their special needs child educated but not at the expense of tearing down the rest of the community school to get only a little bit of help, often by staff not properly trained or supplied to deal with the issue.

[sugarcreekchile]

05:54 AM on 09/01/2011

I agree. My sister could have sent her 2 autism-spectrum children to the district's special school but she insisted on mainstreaming and raised cain at the school everytime they her kids complained about something. The boy disrupted class by blurting stuff out and was agressive towards other children. When he got a germ phobia, my sister went to school with him to open doors and turn book pages. The girl would fixate on a topic and wouldn't stop talking. She, also, would pull her hair out. They had no friends and still don't.

They both live with their mother. The boy, 26, has no social skills, doesn't work, is a blob who plays video games all day and has no impulse control. His sister called the police when he attacked his mother. The girl, 27, lacks social skills but manages to work a part-time unskilled job. Mainstreaming didn't benefit either child.

I understand the special needs parents wanting their kids to be educated, but why should more money be spent on them than average children? Doesn't an average child who's artistically inclined deserve to have an art teacher? Mainstreaming shortchanges normal children when disruptive behavior and teachers having to spend more time with special needs children results in their needs being ignored. When more money is spent on special needs children, things like up-to-date science and computer labs are cut. If cuts are being made by financially strapped school systems, special needs shouldn't be exempt.

[calamityjohn]

11:06 AM on 09/01/2011

so a disruptive disabled child should be segregated even if the cause of their disruptive behavior is their disability .. and where do they go .. to the spec. ed. room with all the other disruptive disabled children ..

so if a child is born with a disability it is their lot to find a way to be educated in a room full of disruptive children (on top of all the other challenges they face) .. where as a child born without such challenges gets to be educated in a room full of children without such behaviors ..

the result .. the disruptive disabled child never really gets an education .. and beyond the moral implications .. ends up costing society $100,000s a year in care to keep them segregated away and healthy for the rest of their lives ..

[buckbuck11]

07:32 PM on 08/31/2011

I'm hard pressed to justify holding SPED spending as "safe harmless" while all other "regular" education programs are economizing and are forced to cut. In my experience as a teacher in one district and as a taxpayer in another, special education budgets have always been bloated and the IDEA has ended up to be a huge unfunded mandate dumped on local property tax payers. I'm glad that the Education Department has finally made one rational decision to hold down these costs.

[fortressfountain]

06:55 PM on 08/31/2011

Most of the money never reaches the students.

[Red Russet]

09:39 PM on 08/31/2011

In NJ it does. It's not uncommon for a special ed school room to have 3 severely incapacitated students, 5 aides and 3 teachers. Overdoing it? I'm not one of the parents, so I really don't know what they are learning.

[Sergeant]

06:19 PM on 08/31/2011

With liberals like this who needs conservatives?

[HockeyMom]

10:50 AM on 09/01/2011

Do you have a point or just bitching?