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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Your heart would break for Timmy, a boy I went to school with. He and I were the same age. Timmy was profoundly retarded. He was non-verbal. He was in our school’s special education program for as long as I knew him.
Timmy was assigned two full-time aides. They hoped that Timmy would learn to feed himself. Other day to day tasks were beyond Timmy’s capabilities. He could not use the toilet on his own; he could not put on a coat when it was cold outside.
Ironically, I’m sure Timmy was the most expensive student in our school district.
I remember in my senior year of high school, the gifted and talented program was cut. It was completely eliminated. And I went to an affluent school district.
It seemed nonsensical then, and it still does now, that our schools have unlimited money for someone who will never be able to tie their shoes, but we have no money to offer an elite education to our future aerospace engineers and medical researchers. It isn’t Timmy’s fault this he can’t contribute to humankind. He life still has intrinsic value; human decency tells us he must be cared for. But certainly not at the expense of developing our best and brightest to their full potential.
I bring this up today because under Wisconsin’s new state budget taxpayers will pick up 40% of each school district’s special education costs. I am also told of a very common scam that school districts are incentivized to classify more kids as special ed – after all, they get more money when more kids are claimed to need special services. If we could only make it financially rewarded for schools to claim more kids are future rocket scientists.
I propose this: a law that requires that whatever a school district spends on special education, they must spend a small percentage of that amount on their most gifted students; perhaps 5%. So hypothetically, a profoundly disabled student like Timmy costs the school district $1-million. Then $50,000 would be set aside for gifted and talented.
I find it distasteful that disabled kids are pitted against very bright students for school funding. But it is also undeniable that it’s in society’s best interest push our brightest as far as they can go.
Chris Conley
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