Those pesky special ed. kids

Honestly, I don't know how parents of children with disabilities do it -- send their kids to public school, that is.

I belong to a couple of different online groups in which members whose children range in disability from cerebral palsy to autism share their experiences with public education. It's heartbreaking to read about their daily, weekly, and yearly struggles to ensure their children get the minimum they're supposed to from school bureaucracies that make the IRS look like an ice-cream shop.

One group to which I belong is made up of parents who decided to homeschool after they got fed up with mounds of paperwork, broken promises, and children who still couldn't read, write, demonstrate basic life skills, or identify colors and numbers after YEARS in special ed. classes.

This last group of parents brought their children home only to find that within six months to a year their kids were doing many things the public schools never seemed able to teach them -- despite saying they would and could.

Go figure.

So it was with great interest that I read an article from the LA Times in which the superintendent of the financially strapped LA school district was quoted as saying, "When you fund some of the special-ed things, you're taking from regular kids."

Let that sink in for just a minute, will you?

Special education -- the education that is most needed for the most vulnerable and challenged among us -- takes away from the "regular" kids.

Of course the answer is to cut special education programs so that the handful of children who admittedly require the most intensive teaching will be left even further behind and the dollars that might have made a world of difference to their educations will be frittered away, lost in the tar pit of general public ed where, as we all know, so many students do so well.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Sometimes it's hard for me to decide who really needs special ed. -- the children whose lives so desperately need the enrichment parents either can't or won't provide, or the idiots who run the school systems.

And the rest of the kids in the LA schools, the so-called "regular" students? They get to enjoy fewer art and music classes, shuttered libraries, and larger classes.

Looks like a lose-lose for everyone.

Public education is failing our children at an alarming rate (see my previous post on Texas' schools failure to prepare its high school grads for college if you don't believe me) but its inability to provide the "free and appropriate" education to children with special needs as required by law is even more problematic.

Maybe the LA superintendent doesn't think special ed students will amount to much so that's why he thinks cutting their programs is acceptable. I'm betting on the parents of those children to teach him differently.