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Date Posted: 12:47:59 03/06/07 Tue
Author: voucher bill
Subject: Reality check for the


Voucher bill ignores true special needs

By ANN ABRAMOWITZ

Published on: 03/06/07

The idea sounds so appealing: giving private-school vouchers to parents who are dissatisfied with the education that their special needs children are receiving from their local public schools. Even the editorial board of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which generally can be trusted to do its homework, has endorsed Senate Bill 10, a voucher bill being considered by the Georgia General Assembly.

Under the current system, parents of children with disabilities are sometimes forced to go through an expensive and time-consuming process of litigation in order to obtain needed services from their public schools. Reforms should be considered to reduce this burden on parents.

The sponsors of SB 10 claim that their bill is intended to address this legitimate concern. The truth, however, is that the proposed bill is seriously flawed. Of particular concern are two major failings of the bill: its treatment of all disabilities as permanent and its potential to deprive many special needs students of services that they require and are entitled to under federal law.

Many of the disabilities for which the bill's proponents are so eager to provide vouchers are temporary. They can be remediated by appropriate services currently available in public schools. These disabilities, which constitute the majority of special needs served by public schools, include speech and language disorders, various developmental delays, learning disabilities, attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder — which often responds to medical intervention — and other medical conditions.

Sometimes, they are corrected within a short time — perhaps two or three years — after which no special services may be needed. That is why federal regulations require evaluations and updates on a regular basis: to ensure that youngsters receive needed services, that the services are modified as necessary and are discontinued when no longer required.

By creating a permanent entitlement to a voucher, the sponsors of SB 10 are inviting abuse by parents who are seeking public funds to pay for a private school education for their children.

According to the provisions of SB 10, as little as one semester of service as a child with special needs makes the student voucher eligible for as long as the parents choose — high school graduation or age 21, whichever comes first. Is this how you wish your tax money to be spent, providing a private school education for youngsters who may not have a disability at all (there would be no way to know for sure because there are no meaningful accountability provisions in the bill)?

Furthermore, the amount of the vouchers would be based on the state's portion of the cost of the special services that would have been provided had the youngsters stayed in their public schools. Yet the bill does not account for fluctuations in the value of these services.

Disabilities change, and needs for service change. The authors of the bill clearly have no understanding of the complexity of these issues and have not accounted in their bill for such changes.

Worse still, the bill risks depriving many special needs students of services that they vitally need. Federal law requires public schools to provide appropriate services to children with special needs. Their need for those services must be determined by careful evaluation and re-evaluated thereafter by a process of reassessment, including whether their needs continue to exist, what progress has been made, and what specific services, if any, are still needed. Parents would surrender these rights when they opt for a voucher under the proposed legislation.

Children with special needs require a variety of services. Federal law recognizes this and guarantees to them essential services, such as speech therapy, occupational therapy, assistive technology and special transportation. All of these services would be excluded from the vouchers under consideration.

As if that were not enough, the bill also fails to require that the private school teachers have any special training working with disabilities. There is not even a requirement that the schools demonstrate any expertise in dealing with these youngsters. All 50 states currently certify personnel to work with special needs children, but no such certification would be required of private schools that receive the proposed voucher money in Georgia.

The bill's sponsors claim that all this is irrelevant because parents know their child's needs best. Parents do. However, it is also true that parents and specialists, working together, as partners, can best determine how children with special needs should be served. The private school marketplace is not one that parents of children with special needs need to enter on their own.

Legislators owe it to children with special needs to take the time to produce a law that provides meaningful choices to parents and that will not cause harm to these children. Legislators also must be accountable to taxpayers and should deal honestly with the public that they serve, especially the most vulnerable of them.

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2007/03/05/0306edvouchers.html

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