Fighting over scraps

Our local school board, as many will be, is considering deep cuts to special education. Parents of regular educations students are chaffing at the rights protected by law that disabled children have. They do not realize that these rights are protected because forty years ago, a child like mine would not be allowed in school at all. 

This is a copy of the open letter I wrote to our board. 

Special education is expensive, as you and caregivers of children with special needs know. However, it is lean, not wasteful. It is expensive locally because special education has already taken a forty percent cut from the federal government. It is not special education that encroaches on the general fund, it is the federal government that encroaches on education as a whole. Please do not continue to refer to our children or their programs as "encroachments". This blames them for a problem that they did not create and over which they have no control. It is inflammatory and insulting language that disguises the true problem. 

I would ask you to be careful as you lead this community. When resources are scarce, and leadership is willing to play on people's weaknesses and fears, people will protect their own at the expense of others. Very few people rescued disabled people during the holocaust. Even in our own New Orleans, gravely ill and disabled people in hospital were euthanized before they were rescued.  Every one is pro-life and pro-child in public, but the terrible truth is that most people wish my child were not here. The easier and more polite way to say this is to demand that she get less money, fewer services and be less of an "encroachment" on more able bodied, promising children. I know that it is easier to say this than to admit that few care if she lives or dies. 

If I had any wish, it would be that she were whole and healthy. I wish for a cure for Rett Syndrome. But there is none now, and we play the hand we are dealt. So instead, I wish for speech generating devices, a nurse who is on campus when she does have a seizure, a teacher who can inspire her to learn, and do her best, even in her daily pain. I wish for friends on campus who know her name, and invite her to play. For the simple joy of being a child in a community that embraces her and does not blame her for the burden that her disability is. 

Thank you for making some of our smaller wishes for her come true. As small as they are, they may be the only ones she ever gets. That our community sacrifices for her and others like her is to our honor; society is judged by how it cares for its weakest and most vulnerable members. 

I hope that you care-- and that you choose wisely. We are not yet on a rooftop in New Orleans. The levies have not yet broken. I do not have to choose between my children, or between yours and mine. 

Warmest Regards, 

Gina Hale, mother to Emma, age 8

school boards' face the impossible

I attended our local school board meeting last night to hear the latest in heartbreaking discussions of what to cut from the budget. This has been a resounding theme in our district, and many others for several years. Of course, we live in California, a state which, with the 7th largest economy in the world has the worst budgeting process in the world as far as I can tell. Still with our schools in 47th out of 50th in funding, we are still trying hard to reach 51 (allowing Puerto Rico to pass us). 

And our courageous Republican minority is still holding the budget hostage (we have a super majority rule here, so that two thirds of the state legislature has to pass the budget) insisting that they will not, not, not raise taxes. It might, they insist, hurt the economy. 

And it is not just the Republican minority in the state legislature. Parcel taxes in our district have failed the last three times we attempted to campaign. People were buying new SUVs and Wii's and wide screen digital TVs and voting down parcel taxes. I guess all that spending was good for the economies of the companies manufacturing these goods-- like Sony, Toyota and GMC. At least American car companies benefitted from all our spending right? And it provided good jobs, with full minimum wage jobs and no benefits or security for retail workers at good retail outlets. 

But I am confused. 

Our govenor lowered taxes, as promised in his campaign to recall the previous govenor, and the economy does not really seem to have gotten better in the last couple years...

Hmmm. So i want to try and think this through. Cut the budget further and what are the results? More people lose their jobs and can't make their mortgages. More homes go into foreclosure. More banks struggle. There are no jobs right now, so more people need general assistance, medicaid and food stamps, (which are also being cut, in order I guess to stimulate the economy) Shelters and food banks are already overwhelmed so I guess those newly homeless people will just have to live under the bridges, which actually are kind of crowded right now...

so how does all this budget cutting help,  exactly?  Any one?

We have already had, for years, kids going around the neighborhood, standing in lines at the grocery store and at the transit stations begging for donations or selling candy and gum to support music, art, sports, and yes, inconceivably even science programs for school. Every time I see them, I am ashamed. I am ashamed of my community, my state and my country. We should be taking care of this, not them. Why are our children forced to walk the streets begging for money for their schools? That seems fiscally irresponsible. Or some kind of irresponsible. 

I am proud to pay my taxes. I would pay more. The amount of money we pay in property taxes would not even cover tuition for one of my children in private school, much less three. And that tax money is supposed to cover a lot of other things, like 911 services, road building, medical and dental insurance for children...

In the Monty Python lampoon the The Life of Brian, they lampooned the anti-government stance. "What have the Romans ever done for us?" asks one of the revolutionaries of Judea. The others chime in, "Well, aqueducts." The first guy pauses, and says, "Well, besides aqueducts!?" After some arguing back and forth the list comes to include most of civilization: aqueducts, schools, sewers, health care, roads, trade... and so on. And after the long list, the first guy finally says, "Yeah, but besides all that?"

So besides dams and aqueducts, navigable harbors and water ways, vector control, health care for children, the elderly and disabled, k-12 schools community colleges and universities, roads, bridges, street lights, public utilities management, pollution regulation, public safety, fire fighters, ambulances, trauma centers, parks and recreation services, water treatment and sewage, farmers markets, street sweeping... what the heck are we getting for our tax dollars? Yeah, but besides that...

I am proud to pay my taxes and do my bit. I wish to never see another homeless family, another homeless veteran, another mentally ill person soiled and sitting in a doorway, another child with bad teeth or another student begging for money for her school. It would be worth not getting my kids an X-Box for that. Maybe they would even get some exercise and read without one. I wonder what others would give up.  And get. If we did. 

Fund the schools. Some day this generation of kids will grow up. And I don't think they will forget what we did when it was our turn to be responsible for them.