FL parents speaking up for special needs scholarship accounts

No, a public school will not provide appropriate therapies for special needs children. Note the qualifier “appropriate.” Special needs students are given an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) that details what such students are taught and what additional therapies will be provided. Fifteen minutes twice a week of speech therapy or physical therapy or occupational therapy is nowhere near enough to make a difference for some students; therefore, it is not appropriate. The McKay Scholarship has very specific requirements, such as having spent the prior school year in your district’s public school. My son is deaf, has cerebral palsy, shunted hydrocephalus, and epilepsy. We gave the local school an opportunity to educate him; the staff was inadequately trained, the aides were negligent; and the curriculum was so generic as to be useless. We home schooled for several years before finding a suitable private school. For the previously stated reason, he was not eligible for the McKay, so funding was always a problem. Now, the PLSA will allow our son to attend this excellent school and will even pay for therapies that Medicaid does not.

Therapy is not cheap, and since insurance companies—as opposed to doctors and therapists—have become the arbiters of what a child needs, many parents must leapfrog the therapies their children receive because said insurance companies, in their wisdom, decide that “this is enough.” Some families have too high an income to qualify for low-income scholarships, though their income is barely enough to survive on. In a perfect world, public schools would have all the money they need to properly educate every student, regardless of his or her specific needs. Curriculum customization costs money; training teachers costs money; transportation costs money; and politics is too frequently the deciding factor in whether a student succeeds.

Therapies aside, is a public school curriculum, In Your Opinion, appropriate for both typical and special needs students? Should not every student be allowed to reach his or her maximum potential? My son certainly has to work ten times as hard—and requires much more one-on-one attention—as a typical kid to make any progress. Would it be appropriate, then, for the typical students to be shortchanged by the teacher because she’s too busy helping my son? Well, there are special ed classes, right? Sure, but they are unfortunately all created equal and are therefore minimally effective in addressing the wide array of developmental, psychological, and physical disabilities their students present.

Do I know the woman quoted in the article? I do not, so I cannot say with complete authority whether she is doing her child a “huge disservice.” I certainly know parents who are lazy and neglectful; my wife works with their children every day in a public school. But I also know that most of us—parents of special needs children, that is—struggle every day doing everything in our power to help our kids succeed. After years of caring for children, something that often involves just keeping them alive, we have learned what they need by way of education, and we’ve learned this from the doctors and therapists who have stood with us during the journey. It takes a lot of work, and anything “public” by its very nature has no room for individualized attention.

Apologies for the somewhat scattered nature of this reply. When I’m feeling this emotional on a topic, it’s difficult to adhere to proper five-paragraph essay organizational structure.