Not all people with disabilities are the children of pro-lifers who would have otherwise aborted them if they weren’t pro-life. Some were not disabled until after birth, some had conditions that were not detected before birth, and some - yes - were actually wanted anyway by their parents.
The cousin I talk about above is in a class of about 10 kids, all with profound disability. Of that, 5 have a severe disability, one that entails feeding tubes and incontinence. The rest of the kids have been mainstreamed (which is another issue of scant resources and how they’re applied, but that’s a hijack). There are 9,276 people in my town - it’s anecdotal, and that classroom includes kids from neighboring unincorporated areas, but your thought that it’s “extremely rare” is incorrect. It is the norm for those kinds of kids to attend local schools.
We’re not talking about slow kids, or autistic kids or kids who are blind or something. We’re talking about kids like my cousin - Joshua is never going to learn anything. He can’t really move. He can’t learn math, and he can’t learn to read. He can’t learn to control his head.
I get the idea of giving the parents a break and providing a high-skill daycare for those kids. But pull it away from the DOE budgets. We’re running out of money now - these kids, who cannot learn, need socialization and other things, but if we’ve decided to fund this as a country/state, then it needs to be separate from the school budgets.
Feeding tubes and incontinence are not brain function or ability to learn though.
I think you’re making the common mistake of thinking you can look at a kid’s physical disabilities and judge their mental abilities.
Unless you know the details of each of these child’s evaluations or have spent a good deal of time with them in the classroom or at home, you don’t know a thing about how well they can learn.
The world is full of stories about people who were told “he’ll never learn to read or write” about kids who learned to read and write. Over and over, they prove the naysayers wrong. And that advice came from experts, which I presume you are not. So I take this with a huge grain of salt. I wonder if Joshua’s parents agree with you.
Did you know that kids with Down syndrome were once considered unable to learn much of anything and excluded from school too? I personally know some people with Down syndrome who have graduated from a 4-year college. And who have written books, or started their own businesses, or play five musical instruments (well - I went to a concert).
So when I hear “he’ll never learn to read and write” or whatever, my eyes glaze over. Joshua will never be just like you and me, but you don’t know what he’ll be able to do.
- The money is still coming from the state, regardless of how you label it or which department you want to move it to. If the SE budget is encompassed in the GE budget, then expect that allocation to be subtracted from the GE budget and put into the new department.
- DDS (Dept. of Dev. Services) is the budget that usually encompasses everything else outside of GE school budgets for the DD population. Residential facilities (child and adult), day programs, SNFs (skilled nursing facilities) for the the disabled AND medically fragile population, and other programs outside of education for the DD population. Most of the DD kids are still living with their parent(s) and receive IHSS (In Home Supportive Services - DDS budgeted) and/or Social Security (based on disability), or in residential facilities (again, DDS budgeted), except for the medically fragile who would be in a pediatric SNF (DDS budgeted). Don’t know the ratio, but I am sure most of the profound kids are not in a SNF, but in their own home or residential facility which is MUCH cheaper to operate (think roughly 20x to 40x cheaper than a SNF).
- Also, there are provisions in the SE budget (or DDS, depending on level of disability) for OT and/or PT on the school premises (my son receives very little of this; about an hour of each per week), so maybe that may be misconstrued as being payed for by GE funds.
- The DD child is allowed to be in the education system up to their 22nd year.
- The disability is documented to have occurred by their 18th birthday (or by the end of their 18th year, YMMV), otherwise they are referred to the Dept. of Rehabilitation, which is woefully underfunded.
Like I said before, there are SOME schools that depend on the DD kids and their budget allotments to fund for General Education. YMMV, but don’t automatically think it’s the other way around. There are schools (and whole districts) looking to get as many DD kids (or classify GE kids as such) to bolster their budget and move it to fill the needs of the GE population. In other words, they are competing with other school districts for state money.
It is MUCH more complex than many here are willing to research it.
Again, YMMV. Different states, counties, school districts, administrators, etc. will determine which way the funding flows; SE->GE, GE->SE, or keep the monies separate, or their is no SE money earmarked and you make do with what you have. YMMV…can’t be stressed enough.
Our current tangential anecdote:
I have heard MANY stories (over the last 20 years) of parents in the past (including my in-laws with a daughter who is currently in a SNF), that back in 1920s, and all the way up to the late 1960s, that parents of developmentally disabled children were encouraged to place their kids in state institutions here in California and basically “forget about them” because the state didn’t want to deal with them in their education system. That was their solution for 50 years until people began to realize that it caused the “inmates” (yeah, that’s what they were called) more harm than good. Uneducated, sheltered, and usually neglected/abused kids became uneducated, fearful/aggressive adults with many issues that required more attention now rather than being able to function at a better level had they stayed with their parents (of course, there were exceptions, but not that many) and some mainstreaming in the education system. Most of those parents wished they had done it differently back then, because the outcome would have been more beneficial to their son/daughter. That is what is ingrained in my wife and I as we continue with our autistic son through the public school system.
We have quite a bit of knowledge (much to our school district’s dismay) to see that our son is given the best with what’s at the district’s disposal, even to the point of my wife and I securing 40 computers (where our SE class got 4 and the other 36 went to the GE classes), a SMART board (thanks to our Doper friends who helped make it possible!), iPads through donations and grants over the last couple of years to our current school. I dare say that we have secured more for the school than what our school has provided for my son. He is able to read at K level now, but sometimes will stun us with words like “Niagra Falls” that he read from one of his many books (he left it open to that page title) and told us in the middle of the night. Once we confirmed that neither of us (and our other son in our house) told him of this page that he actually read, we were totally geeked. He is starting to pick up other words by sounding them out. This would not have happened in any institution…no way, no how.
There are a group of children that absolutely cannot be educated and it boils down to two things:
- They don’t have the desire themselves
- They don’t find themselves in a home that desires it for them.
I didn’t pick ten out of a hat - ten is the delta between the cost to have my friends extreme special needs child in school and the average child.
And it doesn’t make any difference if its my child or not - spending ten time the resources on any one child while other children do not have sufficient resources is wasteful.
The fact is that we don’t have unlimited resources to spend educating our children. We get to decide how to best allocate those dollars. Is it a good idea for the school to buy $100,000 worth of assisted speech equipment for one child when the Science books in the classroom are 30 years old and the rest of the students have a computer to student ratio of 1/200? Is it a good idea to have one full time aide for a student - plus the services of multiple specialists, when that means your third grade classroom is 42 kids and one teacher? What is the ROI on spending over a million dollars to educate ONE child?
Public education serves a public need - to turn our children into contributing citizens. Is a public need - not an individual need - being served by spending $100,000 a year on a single child? And if a public need is being served, is it worth $100,000 or would the $100,000 be better spent on some other public need?
Actually, I hear there are many colleges that are well-known for providing an Absolut education.
(Note to self: Deep breath, count to 10 slowly)
Dangerosa, think about what you wrote for just a second. Try adding a little empathy and understanding. Project what the natural consequence would be if what you wrote became policy. Maybe consider what your life and your family’s life would be like if you swaped your gifted child out for your friends child that costs the school 10x, and the cost that your friend bears emotionally, physically and materially.
At a minimum, as a courtesy, consider leaving this little personal viewpoint unsaid in the future.
Please don’t unsay it, Dangerosa. I get the horror and shock some people feel about a statement like this, but you are correct, IMO. There’s lots of empathy and understanding here, but in a world of limited resources, it should go both ways.
The funds spent on Joshua’s “schooling” is for naught. He can never learn to do anything. The pain our family feels about this is huge, but it doesn’t change the fact that its true. The dollars spent on him to be in school (and it far more than a traditional student because of all the medical type care) is wasted in terms of education. There may be other positives, but those costs are more appropriately paid out of something other than the school budget.
I worry about the high costs of schooling special ed kids, and the impact it has on “normal” school kids. I don’t know the solution, but a discussion is in order.
You’re missing that back in those days kids with ANY type of nereological issue were dumped in the insistutions. It wasn’t just profound or severe. Right now I’m talking about extreme profound kids…Most kids with mental disability or autism will be pretty functional…and they DO deserve an education…But what if they got the education at a SPECIALIZED placement, rather then the Local Public School? People think insistution and they think something like Willowbrook, where a kid is left to rot in a room. I disagree vehemently with something like that
What about something like this? http://www.mhsf.us/ or http://cushingcenters.com/programs-services/ or http://www.crystalspringsinc.org/ or
http://www.crotchedmountain.org/School/School/ Those are all classified as “insistutions”. But I’m just saying that there are kids who are so impaired they don’t even know who their parent is and they don’t even smile…
I agree that whether honestly or not someone is doing the ROI calculations and is making the hard choices, whether they are honest about it or not. It is silly to pretend it isn’t happening, even in private schools eventually the parent has no more money to pay so one way or another resources are being allocated. I think it would be much better to do so honestly rather then ignoring the issue altogether.
Would anyone here disagree with the notion that there’s *some *percentage of spending which is unacceptable if spent on the education of a single child in a public school system?
If 99 cents of every dollar being spent by your school district is being spent on Sally Smith, and there are resource shortages within the district, is that too much?
If we can’t get agreement on that point, the rest of the discussion is pointless.
If we can get agreement on that point, then we’re just quibbling over what that percentage is, and if the student’s apparent ability to learn should be figured in to that equation.
Me, I think we’re at an uncomfortable spot in neurobehavioral science right now. We know that we don’t know, but we don’t yet know how to know, whether some individuals are capable of learning, especially when they’re young children. So I think it best that we err on the side of there being “somebody home”, but that does need to be balanced with everyone else’s need for a decent education, too. I don’t know how to do that.
Anecdote time: I’ve got a friend with severe spastic Cerebral Palsy due to an accident during childbirth where her oxygen was cut off too long. Her muscles are all permanently contracted. She weighs all of 75 pounds. She’s in a wheelchair all the time. This isn’t her, but she looks very much like this person in the center, only skinnier. She’s can’t speak, she can’t wheel herself or feed herself or toilet herself. Her arms and legs are always flailing around, and she chokes a lot while she’s eating. For many years, she was thought to be little more than a vegetable. Anyone who doesn’t know her or her medical history would assume she’s “ineducable”. She has one of those mothers who wouldn’t hear no, though. Eventually it was discovered that she has conscious motor control over her eyes and, to a small extent, her head. She can look up and to the left. That’s it. She can also, much to many people’s surprise, read and spell, because her caregivers read to her lots when she was small. So we talk by listing all the letters of the alphabet, and when we hit the one she wants, she looks up and to the left. It’s laborious as hell.
“First half?”
up and to the left
“A B C D E F G H I -”
up and to the left
“I as in you?”
up and to the left
“First half?”
no response
“M N O P Q R S -”
up and to the left
“S?”
up and to the left
“First half?”
up and to the left
“A-”
up and to the left
A?"
up and to the left
“SA - Saw?”
up and to the left
“I saw. First half?”
up and to the left
“A B C D E F G H I J K L. L?”
up and to the left
First half?"
no response
“M N O -”
“O? LO - Logan? You saw Logan?”
no response
“Okay, not Logan. I saw. First half?”
no response
“M N O P Q R S-”
up and to the left
“S?”
up and to the left
“LOS. First half?”
no response
“M N O P Q R S T-”
up and to the left
“T? LOST - Lost! You saw Lost?”
up and to the left
And so on.
And so on. Takes forever, although practice makes it go faster than you’d think. But there’s a mind in there, and she’s got friends and family…and a Master’s Degree*. It took a lot of money and a lot of extra time and resources to get it (much of which came from the doctor’s malpractice insurance company as a settlement for her lifelong care and maintenance due to some truly horrendously wrong medical decisions he made during her birth.) She wanted that degree just as much as anyone wants their degree, and she had the cognitive ability to earn it - with lots of communication and physiological assistance.
So who decides? Me? The principal or superintendent? The student? The student’s family? Doctors? I don’t have good answers, but I can definitely understand the questions.
*(She also has a wicked sense of humor and a potty mouth. Woman can swear like a sailor, one letter at a time…)
You mean extreme profound/severe kids right? Again as I have said, the overwhelming majority of kids with sped issues can and do aquire at least functional skills…Even moderate kids can do sheltered workshop type stuff. …But at the same time, its like the population we’re talking about, functions at best on the level of a toddler. Not to mention when they graduate, they go into day programs …and those kids are a lot more functional then the type of kid I was talking about. Oh boy…I do think that there needs to be special funding for those kids. It’s a FACT that there are kids who are just totally and completely Impaired, and can NEVER do anything. They’re going to be essentially babies for the rest of their lives. Yes, we should take care of them…but they are never going to learn. Yes, it’s all Warm and Fuzzy to hear about those kids who achieve more then anyone ever thought possible…but how often does that happen? I have a syndrome that can and does cause profound and severe mental disability…I’ve seen some really bad kids, and some really delusional parents. Heck, lance strongarm almost sounds like this parent: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/foliot/savage/
WHAT??? Talk about EUPHANISM!!! Those two girls are PROFOUNDLY affected! http://www.rarediseases.org/rare-disease-information/rare-diseases/byID/970/viewAbstract
and http://cortfoundation.org/cms/get-informed/associated-syndromes/walker-warburg-syndrome/
As far as I know, these are meaningless terms in current medical theory, diagnosis and treatment.
One decade’s “never going to learn” is another decade’s Master’s Thesis. The friend I described can’t function on her own nearly as well as a toddler can, so you’re going to have to come up with some other rubric to measure your “extreme profound/severe kids” by. By your toddler function standard, a woman with a Master’s Degree is “never going to learn”, so it’s obviously a flawed standard.
Absolutely. I totally completely agree with this. I think it’s a waste of public resources to “educate” such kids in mainstream public schools. I’d rather see respite care for their caregivers and compassionate sensory stimulation for them, paid for out of medical, not educational, funds.
I also don’t think you’ve demonstrated anything which convinces me that you can correctly identify these kids in a lineup.
Can the doctors and special ed teachers and parents? I’m not sure. Sometimes. Sometimes they get it wrong. But I think they’ve got a little better shot at getting it right than you or I do, if for no other reason than they’ve actually sat with the individual in question and assessed them, not a picture or description of them.
Identification is important, of course. But then, I don’t think that means that the child of your friend (or was she your friend, I’m getting confused) would’ve been particularly well off at a regular school. If she had had a special teacher there, who is to say that that person would’ve noticed her capabilities? And how good are the rest of the facilities at a normal school suited to her situation?
The school where my MIL teaches is geared specially towards these kinds of problems. In all possible ways: they have experts, many people who lavish attention on the kids. Like you, they see a myriad of possibilities behind every child: that is their job. Just from looking at a child you will never know all they can do. So the school is the perfect place to find out, develop, get treatment, find out what works. Etc. etc. One person helping out at a normal school doesn’t have the same potential.
I should also point out that it is absolutely not the same as being “institutionalised”. Really, really not the same.
I don’t think anyone disagrees with that point.
The implication, though, is that there are lots of kids like that in schools. There aren’t. The other implication is the OP author or anyone else can just look at a kid and tell he can’t be educated. That’s bullshit.
Most of the kids who we all agree CAN be educated would have been judged uneducable just a few decades ago. So pretending that this is a simple discussion is a mistake.
You tell us - you seem to know.
Wait, you don’t know?
Then either find out, or stop insisting that we should accept your opinion based on no evidence.
And the point you’re missing is that the same point - back then, those kids were considered just as “profound and severe” as those we now label as such. Yet they were wrong.
Yes, there are always going to be kids who simply can’t learn or function. But there is no bright line between them and those who can. You certainly can’t tell them just by looking at them.
30 years ago, there were kids with autism who couldn’t communicate at all and were considered hopeless cases. Now some of them write books. The world of special ed is changing fast, and it’s a mistake to just declare that we know everything now.
The woman with CP is my friend. (As is her mother, but that’s just confusing.) And you know…I have no idea what her schooling as a child looked like. I’ll have to ask her. Considering that she’s 40 now, I’m guessing she wasn’t mainstreamed, and probably wasn’t even in a special ed classroom, just based on the history of special education.
This sounds fantastically wonderful. If I were Queen of the World and could bestow funding where I wanted, these would be the schools for kids like my friend was and they’d have more staff, more seats and be in more towns than they are now.
I have horror and shock over it myself. But we do not have unlimited resources. If we were willing to dump endless dollars into schools, it would be different. But with limited public dollars we need to make choices. Do we spend a lot of money on one child and less on fifty others? Do we educate at the expense of health care? Or housing for the poor? Or economic incentives that provide jobs? Or repairing our crumbling infrastructure? Or a national defense?
What gives us the most benefit as a society? If you had someone you love die of cancer, as I did recently, you can’t spend enough on cancer research. But you can spend too much on cancer research when it means not spending on education. The answer involves balance. And balance involves a resolution for situations that are unbalanced. This is one