In my experience, the most severely disabled get expensive special education services, regardless of what the quality of those services may be. But there are few private schools (at least in South Florida) which can meet the needs of those students at a reasonable cost – even if a parent gets a $20,000 McKay Scholarship to private school!

Because of the way Florida special education funding is structured there is no added incentive for giving special ed. services to the moderately disabled – the schools do not get more money for labeling or serving them than they get for the mild or marginally disabled. Yet, the moderately disabled are more difficult and expensive to educate. Thus, I have found that Florida parents of the moderately disabled tend to be less satisfied with the public schools which generally are not effectively educating them.

If a parent of a moderately disabled student leaves public school with a McKay voucher worth let’s say $10,000/year, that money could put a good dent in a Florida private school tuition which may do a better job educating that child. At the same time, the school district still retains the federal special ed. funds for that child but is no longer responsible for the touch job of educating him or her.

The bottom line is that while special needs vouchers may not decrease the financial incentive to label students who are moderately disabled, they may result in a win-win situation for both schools and parents. And the largest growth in the use of Florida special needs vouchers may come from those students.

I thought schools complain that special education was a horrible financial burden on them. You would think they would be eager to push disabled kids out the door to save money.

I also found it interesting that someone in the minutes seemed to be against the bill but had the objection that it wouldn’t be fair to special needs kids already enrolled in private schools on the ground that kids could only be eligible for the voucher if they were on an IEP.

One person believed that this restriction would mean the kid could only go to the private school for one year and then must return to the public school because the private school wouldn’t give an IEP.

Another worried that private schools would take special needs kids just to get the income even though they didn’t have a program for special needs kids (aka parents are too stupid)

Another worried that private schools didn’t have certified teachers *rolls eyes*

And the Nye County School District did not like it because the children would not be subject to NCLB and therefore the private schools wouldn’t be held accountable to providing a quality education.

…I guess NCLB is good if it prevents the competition from getting funding but its bad if it means you actually have to prove that the kids are learning.

When I read the bill the scholarship would be the sum of the Basic Support (the state’s per pupil appropriation to each district – this ranges from just under $5,000 to $17,000 but averages $5,250) plus whatever additional local/state/federal fund was available for special education.

While the districts total appropriation would decrease the per-pupil funding would, in the worst case scenario, remain the same.

They of course don’t want to lose a dime.

1) Students never lose whatever protection the IEP provides becuase they can always return to public schools and accept those services or pursue the legal process. All that the voucher does is give them an additional mechanism for obtaining the services they desire.

2) According to an evaluation of McKay that Greg and I conducted in 2003 (see http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_38.htm )students were more likely to receive needed services when they switched to a private schools with a voucher. Even though they were legally entitled to those services in public schools, they often weren’t able to get them. And in the private schools, where they had no legal rights to specific services but did have market power, they were significantly more likely to get those services. Go figure.