Over at Down with Absolutes there is currently a vituperative mudfest (it dignifies the argument to call it a debate) over the upcoming expenditures by Capital School District on the Kent County Secondary Intensive Learning Center.
The KCSILC new building will cost an initial $800,000 build-out, an $236,000/year for a five-year lease.
DWA commentator Discourse tries to cost the whole thing out and concludes, "Looks to me like the taxpayers in Kent are putting up about $15,000.00 a year to baby sit the 100 kids who evidently can’t attend the regular high school." He later notes, "These kids are not mentally challenged but “behaviorially challenged”. Basically, these are the kids that made you real nervous when you walked down the school hallway."
What's discouraging about the flying charges and counter-charges (Dana Garrett wants Discourse to give up all credentials as a liberal, Liz Allen chides him for being "non compassionate," while Discourse and others fire back in the same vein) is that nobody seems to be focusing on the details of this--even though they are not that hard to find.
The PEAK program is a collaborative effort with Delaware Tech, largely organized by former Capital School Board member Paul Fleming, to offer alternatives to suspension and expulsion for students with severe behavioral problems.
In many cases the 70+ students who take part under PEAK, or who have been assigned to the Kent County Secondary Intensive Learning Center have behavioral problems that are related to learning disabilities--which leaves the district absolutely no choice under Federal and State law but to create a program to meet their needs.
Here's where Dana is right (if offensively dyspeptic): if the US has a responsibility (he would prefer "right") to provide public education for all children, then these children are included. Period. That's the law.
Capital manages the consolidated ILC program for all the Kent County school districts (who pay for the students they send there, as well as other cost-sharing), and the Kent ILC has a remarkably good record of success, given the limited resources with which it has to work.
The irony: removing these children from the mainstream classroom environment pays dividends in improved instructional atmosphere for the remaining students; it provides those students with a more structured environment in which many of them do learn, and graduate back into mainstream classrooms, and the actual cost per child is not 3 times as much (which Mike Protack argues) but about twice as much.
However, that cost analysis does not take into account the resources that the referring school no longer has to expend on those children.
Over the past seventeen years at DSU I have had the pleasure to teach at least a dozen students who self-identified as having passed through either the Kent or Sussex ILC programs. Unanimously, those students attributed not only their graduation from high school, but also their ability to go to college to the success they experienced in those programs.
There have been privatized successes in Kent and Sussex Counties in this regard over the years (Reverend Cherry's Because We Care program comes to mind), but the grim reality is that right now the free market is not stepping in with large-scale solutions at this point.
I remember going to school in rural Virginia in the early 1960s. The Special Education kids were the ones who helped serve ice cream in the cafeteria, and that was about the extent of their education.
Libertarian thinking posits the necessity of running society on the basis of personal responsibility, but it is important to acknowledge that circumstances can damage or destroy an individual's ability to take "personal responsibility" for his or her life or actions. Mental retardation, autism, fetal alcohol syndrome--all kinds of things produce children who cannot learn in the same settings as others. Nor in most cases do the parents possess the resources (or even the education) necessary to find an appropriate education for these children.
I have no problem with the State or the District expending tax dollars to provide an education for these children as long as it is a real education, with fully qualified professional staff; they are American citizens and we have an obligation toward them.
Oh, damn, now Dana will want me to turn in my Libertarian membership card, or else he'll demand that I "tell the truth" and admit I really want to keep property taxes down so that the wealthy of Dover can afford gated compounds with attack dogs and snipers to shoot the poor little bastards as they rummage through garbage cans because we closed all the schools.
The KCSILC new building will cost an initial $800,000 build-out, an $236,000/year for a five-year lease.
DWA commentator Discourse tries to cost the whole thing out and concludes, "Looks to me like the taxpayers in Kent are putting up about $15,000.00 a year to baby sit the 100 kids who evidently can’t attend the regular high school." He later notes, "These kids are not mentally challenged but “behaviorially challenged”. Basically, these are the kids that made you real nervous when you walked down the school hallway."
What's discouraging about the flying charges and counter-charges (Dana Garrett wants Discourse to give up all credentials as a liberal, Liz Allen chides him for being "non compassionate," while Discourse and others fire back in the same vein) is that nobody seems to be focusing on the details of this--even though they are not that hard to find.
The PEAK program is a collaborative effort with Delaware Tech, largely organized by former Capital School Board member Paul Fleming, to offer alternatives to suspension and expulsion for students with severe behavioral problems.
In many cases the 70+ students who take part under PEAK, or who have been assigned to the Kent County Secondary Intensive Learning Center have behavioral problems that are related to learning disabilities--which leaves the district absolutely no choice under Federal and State law but to create a program to meet their needs.
Here's where Dana is right (if offensively dyspeptic): if the US has a responsibility (he would prefer "right") to provide public education for all children, then these children are included. Period. That's the law.
Capital manages the consolidated ILC program for all the Kent County school districts (who pay for the students they send there, as well as other cost-sharing), and the Kent ILC has a remarkably good record of success, given the limited resources with which it has to work.
The irony: removing these children from the mainstream classroom environment pays dividends in improved instructional atmosphere for the remaining students; it provides those students with a more structured environment in which many of them do learn, and graduate back into mainstream classrooms, and the actual cost per child is not 3 times as much (which Mike Protack argues) but about twice as much.
However, that cost analysis does not take into account the resources that the referring school no longer has to expend on those children.
Over the past seventeen years at DSU I have had the pleasure to teach at least a dozen students who self-identified as having passed through either the Kent or Sussex ILC programs. Unanimously, those students attributed not only their graduation from high school, but also their ability to go to college to the success they experienced in those programs.
There have been privatized successes in Kent and Sussex Counties in this regard over the years (Reverend Cherry's Because We Care program comes to mind), but the grim reality is that right now the free market is not stepping in with large-scale solutions at this point.
I remember going to school in rural Virginia in the early 1960s. The Special Education kids were the ones who helped serve ice cream in the cafeteria, and that was about the extent of their education.
Libertarian thinking posits the necessity of running society on the basis of personal responsibility, but it is important to acknowledge that circumstances can damage or destroy an individual's ability to take "personal responsibility" for his or her life or actions. Mental retardation, autism, fetal alcohol syndrome--all kinds of things produce children who cannot learn in the same settings as others. Nor in most cases do the parents possess the resources (or even the education) necessary to find an appropriate education for these children.
I have no problem with the State or the District expending tax dollars to provide an education for these children as long as it is a real education, with fully qualified professional staff; they are American citizens and we have an obligation toward them.
Oh, damn, now Dana will want me to turn in my Libertarian membership card, or else he'll demand that I "tell the truth" and admit I really want to keep property taxes down so that the wealthy of Dover can afford gated compounds with attack dogs and snipers to shoot the poor little bastards as they rummage through garbage cans because we closed all the schools.
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