UPDATE and ACTION ALERT from Stop Special Needs Vouchers, Wed 17 June 2015
1 view
Skip to first unread message
Stop Special Needs Vouchers
Jun 17, 2015, 7:29:37 AM6/17/15
to J Juhnke
Greetings from Stop Special Needs Vouchers -- please forward widely and quickly.
A Letter from Parents to Share with Legislators (and everyone else!)
The following hard-hitting letter from a group of Stop Special Needs Vouchers parents appeared in Madison's Cap Times online on Tuesday. It spells out succinctly, but in some detail, our fervent objections to the underhanded special needs voucher proposal, inserted into the state budget after midnight to avoid public input.
Astonishingly, the budget is still not a done deal -- the Joint Finance Committee has not even scheduled their final meeting yet, and then the budget still must clear the legislature before going to the governor. There is still time to contact our legislators, and spread the word!
Thanks again, so much, for everything you do for Wisconsin's students!
============
With no opportunity for public input or debate whatsoever, and not even a hint that it was coming, the majority-party members of the JFC suddenly voted the special needs vouchers into the state budget. There was much self-congratulation before the vote about how important it is to “trust the parents” in matters of education.
If they had trusted us to testify, we could have told them exactly why parents like us, not to mention every disability advocacy organization in the state, oppose their special needs voucher proposals.
Private voucher schools are not required to educate students with special needs, as the public schools are. They need not have special educators on staff, nor are they required to follow the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which establishes our children’s rights to a free, appropriate public education with a legally binding Individualized Education Plan.
Voucher schools can expel or “counsel out” students they find too challenging to educate, and the public schools must take the rejected students back while the funding lags behind. We don’t know how many students with disabilities have even been allowed into the voucher schools, because the schools haven’t been required to reveal how many such students are voucher-enrolled.
Yet, with all of these dodges in place, voucher schools in Milwaukee have had a long track record of failing to do any better than the Milwaukee public schools. Instead, we have scandals such as LifeSkills Academy, and the dozens of Milwaukee students they abandoned when they fled Wisconsin for Florida in the middle of the night. Incidentally, the new LifeSkills Academy in Daytona Beach is still open, relying now onFlorida’s special needs voucher funding.
Meanwhile, voucher schools and the voucher lobby are very skilled at marketing. We’ve heard the pitches and seen the glossy brochures. There’s personal experience in our group of being taken in by what the voucher schools promised, until our children actually attended and discovered sad differences between the sales job and the reality.
It’s abundantly clear that Wisconsin’s voucher programs, both present and proposed, leave families at the mercy of shady operators, even while draining the public schools of much-needed funding.
Four decades ago, families like ours advocated to secure our children with disabilities the right to a solid public education, in neighborhood schools where the doors must be open to all children regardless of disability. We strongly object to having our tax dollars suctioned out of public schools where those hard-won rights apply, and spent to lure families into fly-by-night private schools where all of the federal special education rights and protections disappear, to be replaced by nothing more binding than a warning of “buyer, beware!”
Our children deserve better. Wisconsin deserves better.
We call on the Wisconsin Legislature to walk away from the voucher-lobby sales job. Take the special needs vouchers out of the state budget!
Pamela DeLap (Oshkosh), Terri Hart-Ellis (Whitefish Bay), Amy Polsin (Lowell), Naomi Silver (River Falls), Kelli Simpkins (Madison) and Lennise Vickers (Milwaukee) are all members of the statewide grassroots group Stop Special Needs Vouchers.
Take special needs vouchers out of the budget
16 June 2015
As parents of students with disabilities, we have fought for years to protect robust public education for children across Wisconsin. We have repeatedly raised our voices to defeat the harmful special needs voucher bills that keep surfacing in Madison, pushed by big money from out of state.
With no opportunity for public input or debate whatsoever, and not even a hint that it was coming, the majority-party members of the JFC suddenly voted the special needs vouchers into the state budget. There was much self-congratulation before the vote about how important it is to “trust the parents” in matters of education.
If they had trusted us to testify, we could have told them exactly why parents like us, not to mention every disability advocacy organization in the state, oppose their special needs voucher proposals.
Private voucher schools are not required to educate students with special needs, as the public schools are. They need not have special educators on staff, nor are they required to follow the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which establishes our children’s rights to a free, appropriate public education with a legally binding Individualized Education Plan.
Voucher schools can expel or “counsel out” students they find too challenging to educate, and the public schools must take the rejected students back while the funding lags behind. We don’t know how many students with disabilities have even been allowed into the voucher schools, because the schools haven’t been required to reveal how many such students are voucher-enrolled.
Yet, with all of these dodges in place, voucher schools in Milwaukee have had a long track record of failing to do any better than the Milwaukee public schools. Instead, we have scandals such as LifeSkills Academy, and the dozens of Milwaukee students they abandoned when they fled Wisconsin for Florida in the middle of the night. Incidentally, the new LifeSkills Academy in Daytona Beach is still open, relying now onFlorida’s special needs voucher funding.
Meanwhile, voucher schools and the voucher lobby are very skilled at marketing. We’ve heard the pitches and seen the glossy brochures. There’s personal experience in our group of being taken in by what the voucher schools promised, until our children actually attended and discovered sad differences between the sales job and the reality.
It’s abundantly clear that Wisconsin’s voucher programs, both present and proposed, leave families at the mercy of shady operators, even while draining the public schools of much-needed funding.
Four decades ago, families like ours advocated to secure our children with disabilities the right to a solid public education, in neighborhood schools where the doors must be open to all children regardless of disability. We strongly object to having our tax dollars suctioned out of public schools where those hard-won rights apply, and spent to lure families into fly-by-night private schools where all of the federal special education rights and protections disappear, to be replaced by nothing more binding than a warning of “buyer, beware!”
Our children deserve better. Wisconsin deserves better.
We call on the Wisconsin Legislature to walk away from the voucher-lobby sales job. Take the special needs vouchers out of the state budget!
=====
For complete current coverage of stories as they appear, "like" our Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/StopSpecialNeedsVouchers
For an introduction to Stop Special Needs Vouchers, visit our website at:
http://www.stopspecialneedsvouchers.org/about/
For a list of past SSNV press coverage, visit our In the News page at
http://www.stopspecialneedsvouchers.org/in-the-news/
To subscribe to these mailings, or to unsubscribe, send e-mail to
stopspecialneedsvouchers@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/StopSpecialNeedsVouchers
For an introduction to Stop Special Needs Vouchers, visit our website at:
http://www.stopspecialneedsvouchers.org/about/
For a list of past SSNV press coverage, visit our In the News page at
http://www.stopspecialneedsvouchers.org/in-the-news/
To subscribe to these mailings, or to unsubscribe, send e-mail to
stopspecialneedsvouchers@gmail.com
===============================
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages