Arizona Leftists Come After Special Needs Kids (Commentary)

On Wednesday, the Arizona Senate Education Committee will hear a bill by Democratic state senator Christine Marsh, SB 1354, that purports to help families with students with special needs. In reality, the policies in the bill would saddle families and schools with unnecessary hassles and costs.

According to Save Our Schools Arizona, which has long fought against families using ESAs to educate their children, the proposal would require private schools accepting ESA funds “to notify parents of whether they provide special-education services for their students” and “honor students’ [Individualized Education Program] and 504 plans unless the parents waive those rights in writing.”

That might sound innocent enough, but in practice, the bill would create needless hoops for families and schools to jump through.

Students with IEPs or 504 plans need to have them periodically updated as the student progresses. However, the only way to do that is to be enrolled as a full-time student in a traditional district school. That means that an ESA student with special needs would have to leave the ESA program and their private school, enroll in a district school, have the school update their IEP or 504 plan, and then re-enroll in the ESA program and private school.

This process is unnecessarily burdensome for families of students with special needs and both the private and district schools. It would also be extraordinarily costly for taxpayers, as they would be double paying for these students in both the district school system and the ESA program.

So why not just waive their rights, as the bill would have them do? SOS and other opponents of education choice claim to be concerned that students with special needs don’t have the same “rights” in private schools as they do in traditional district schools. They should speak to actual families of students with special needs.

Those families already know that their child has “rights” in the district schools, yet tens of thousands of them prefer an ESA anyway. Why?

If SOS bothered to speak to them, they’d find that too many were forced to spend several years and large sums of money to have their child’s supposed “rights” respected by their assigned district school, often to no avail.

How do I know? A decade ago, my colleague Jonathan Butcher and I conducted the first survey of Arizona ESA families. At the time, the ESA program was still limited to students with special needs who had switched out of a public school. Only 30% of the respondents said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their prior public school, compared to 90% who were satisfied with the education their child was receiving with an ESA.

When asked to elaborate about their experiences at their prior public school, here’s what some of them had to say:

• “Very frustrating! [Our public] school did everything to avoid providing services. My child has multiple disabilities, and [school officials] would only give him one time per month consultative therapies. It was outrageous!”
• “The [public] school had a hard time catering to both my child’s giftedness and his disability, particularly his poor social skills. They couldn’t keep him challenged in the curriculum because they were overwhelmed by his behavior. They got him an aide but failed to train the aide how to work with him so he was learning appropriate skills. It was nothing more than a glorified babysitter.”
• “Lack of training for [public school] staff and teachers led to bullying of my child by adults and other children. She regressed in many areas, and now we are trying to get caught up.”
• “The [public] school she attended did not provide any OT (Occupational Therapy) services. There were also issues with her [being] teased and ridiculed in regard to her disability.”
• “I was extremely dissatisfied. The communication and follow-through with staff was non-existent and the bullying was out of control. My son was so unhappy.”

By contrast, the ESA empowered them to choose the learning environments that work best for their children. What they lack in so-called “rights,” they more than made up for in power—including the power to walk away from a school, tutor, therapist, or other education provider that wasn’t working out. For the ESA families, that meant that the education providers were directly accountable to them.

Here are some of the things the families had to say about the ESA program:

• “Enrolling in the ESA program allowed our child to attend a private school for children with autism with minimal additional cost to our family. We can truly say that this was the best decision we’ve made in moving our child forward, and it would not have been possible without the ESA program giving us the financial ability to choose this very beneficial path.”
• “The ESA program has given us choice in our child’s education and access to a private school aimed at children with autism. She has developed tremendously over the past school year.”
• “We are very satisfied with the level of freedom [the] ESA allows in getting our daughter the education she needs to enter into regular classes rather than having the school system keep her in special ed the rest of her life.”
• “I really love the ESA program. It has given parents a choice where there was none. It indirectly raises the expectations of school programs. It raises the level of care, raises the competition between schools—a giant benefit for the whole population. Bravo! Now the kids who were being bullied and neglected have a chance to get away and go to a place that is better.”

ESA families are already happier with the options available to them in the private sector than the supposed “rights” they have in the district schools. The proposed legislation would only create unnecessary hoops for families and schools to jump through.

If things aren’t working out for an ESA family, they have lots of other choices—including the district school system. But forcing them back into a relationship with the school system they intentionally left behind, or saddling them with unnecessary paperwork, does nothing to help the families of students with special needs.

The policies in SB 1354 are worse than a solution in search of a problem—they’re a problem that would undermine a solution.

Originally published by The Heritage Foundation. Republished with permission.

For more School Reform News.