Getting the District to Pay for Private Schooling for your Learning Disabled Child
The law says that a child that is learning disabled, is the responsibility of the government public schooling system. If your child should have difficulty with keeping pace with a regular class schedule, and if you can prove it on a test, which the school system has to pay for, then your job is done, because your child's special education needs are taken care of - at a great private school with special teaching resources. But all this is easier said than done. What usually happens is, the school district offers to put your child in a class for disabled children, where everyone else has a variety of problems. When you weigh that against a nice well-funded private school for your child that can place him in a normal classroom, but help him in the special ways he needs, it is just no contest. If you protest the school district's decision to just pack them away in a classroom with other challenged children, they usually just turn you away and say that they know best. There is a provision in the law has that requires the school district to pay for your child's education at a private school. But the school district wonders how they are ever going to afford to spend something like $50,000 a year on one child.
They have actually been debating this back and forth for about three years now, at state-level courts and at the Supreme Court. The law just merely says that the District owes every child, learning disabled or normal, an appropriate public education for free. There are no real specifics mentioned. There are more than 5 million children in this country who have special-education needs, and most of them go to their local public schools. It remains up to the parents to actually prove their case that the public school option isn't really cutting it. There are maybe just 75,000 families that have succeeded in convincing the school system that their children must be privately educated, and that the government must pay for it. Usually, those children are quite terribly handicapped.
The school system basically wonders if the parents are just trying to pick something up for free for their children, even if it is really unnecessary. Certainly, private schools have better facilities and better decor. Is it possible that the parents are making the government pay for their learning disabled child's education at a private institution just for such shallow perks? The problem, or a big part of it, is autism. This disorder is on a path to epidemic proportions. And a child with this disorder needs to start education and therapy long before he starts school. Of course, since the school system is out of the question before the age of three, parents just start with private schooling for their child. But the moment child turns three, the public school system says that they had better put the child in one of their classrooms. With a child already struggling with problems, such a change of environment, parents feel, will be just catastrophic.
The government just doesn't want to have to pay parents who can well-afford to put their children in a good private school themselves. And that happens a lot of time. When parents sue the school system for not paying for their child's private education, it's about evenly split, the chances they have of winning. Half the time, the government wins saying that the parents could just try public education first before mounting a lawsuit. And half the time, the parents win. They've been arguing this case and the Supreme Court's recently, and justices there seem to like the government's argument better. How could parents demand payment for private education - subsidized education for their children at private schools, when they've never tried the alternative?
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