School Finance Reform--How it Affects the Vulnerable

by Kathleen Kosobud, PhD, ABD
Disclaimer: This is a personal reflection and may not represent the position of LDA of Michigan as an organization.

I'm an advocate for children with special educational needs. I represent children in foster care, probably one of the least empowered groups attending public schools. Current Michigan school code already allows districts and charters to discriminate against children in special education by limiting their choices. Their "home" district must agree to pay for them to attend a school in a different Intermediate School District (essentially a different county or LEA) even if the receiving school is part of a "school of choice" district. The rationale is that it costs more to educate a child with special educational needs. No such restriction exists for children who are considered "gifted" or "athletes" or "talented", although their needs may also cost a district more. This restriction is "enhanced" in the 302 page long Oxford proposal for Michigan School Finance Reform--districts will have the right to accept or refuse students who apply to attend their schools.

I am sick at heart when I think about the children whom I represent. Many have been removed from their homes after severe abuse or neglect. Already hurting, they deserve the very best of care, and the most particularly attentive of educations to help them to recover from their physical and psychological wounds. When a district is given the right of refusal to serve these children, we condemn them to bleak futures. While other, more privileged children may cross boundaries, selling their assets to the highest bidder, these children are left to attend whatever public schools their district assigns them to. For them, there is no choice.

I think of two children I am representing right now: one a traumatized first grader who has already been in five different foster homes, and two different school districts in his short career as a consumer of public education, and the other a teenager approaching his exit from foster care in an institutional setting because no home could be found for him. This older student, discouraged and angry at the lack of concern he has experienced in a bricks and mortar school, is currently taking online classes, isolated from the social milieu of other teens. His special educational needs, learning disabilities in language and literacy, are not being met in this virtual environment, and the virtual charter is not prepared to devote the resources to customize his education in a way that will enable him to access the courses. I despair for both of them. For the first grader, I see a future of rejection by schools unwilling to meet his his greater needs for stability and special care because his coping mechanisms are so fragile. For the older student, I see a loss of any interest in learning, and decreasing hope for any future outside of the institutional setting. He is the face of the "school to prison pipeline", even though the caring adults around him recognize that he is not intrinsically a bad kid.

For these two children, the proposal for "choice" is a sick, sad joke.