Would You Take Your Child's School Funding and Split?

Last Friday, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin followed up on her promise to be a friend and advocate to children with special needs and their families with a speech outlining a plan for improving IDEA funding and educational opportunities. I'm sure there are a lot of opinions among readers here about the things the McCain campaign has chosen to focus on, the viability of the plan, the political digs in the speech, and the politicizing of children with disabilities. I've opened up a forum topic with the complete text of the speech and an invitation to comment on it, and I hope you will use that for general discussion and debate.

Something I'd like to consider here, though, is the idea of increasing school choice for parents of children in special education. If something like a voucher system could be applied to specialized schools that now only accept referrals and payments from school districts, that's sure something I'd like to have up my sleeve when I sit down at an IEP meeting.

It's long been a frustration of mine that, while parents of children in regular education are free to send their kids to private or religious or charter schools, parents of children with significant special educational needs are pretty much limited to what the school district offers. The IEP team has all the power over whether a student goes to an "out of district" school, and whether that student can stay there in any given school year. I've periodically researched schools in our area that might have been useful for my son, but even if we could have afforded to pay for them ourselves, these schools don't want our money; they'll only take kids referred by and funded by school districts.

That gives districts a lot of power, and parents few options beyond legal fights and homeschooling. I wonder how the balance of power would shift in IEP meetings if parents actually had the ability to say, "Well, thanks very much, but we're going to take our child's state and federal funding and go somewhere else." Even if you didn't want to go somewhere else, it would be nice to have that option understood, wouldn't it? Perhaps it would change the "this is the way it is" attitude that pervades so many program decisions.

With inclusion becoming more and more the rule in U.S. schools, the ability to remove your child from an inclusion program that isn't working -- or to keep your child in a successful specialized-school program rather than having him yanked back in-district -- would be a nice safeguard for parents. If nothing else, I'd like to feel that my district had to work a little to compete for me.

How do you feel about your child's special-education funding being portable? Would you like the power to move, or do you think it would weaken public-school programs too severely -- or cause districts to force difficult students out? Share your thoughts in the comments (on this subject only, please -- for the speech as a whole, please visit the forum topic).

Read more: Special Needs News | Site of the Day | What Do You Want Sarah Palin to Do for Your Family?