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Over 15,000 NYC Special Needs Kindergarteners Left Without A Seat This September
Dennis Walcott has to find seats for over 15,000 special needs children this fall.
Just coming off the Cathie Black debacle, the New York City Schools system is still struggling with major issues. New chancellor Dennis Walcott is facing a huge problem of his own as there are currently 15,500 special needs Kindergarten aged students with no placements for this fall. While most public school kids have already been guaranteed a spot in their schools, education officials are now scrambling to find assignments for the 15,000+ incoming kindergartners with special needs all due to changes to the city’s special education program.
Under current law, if the public school system does not have a seat for a special needs student, the city pays the tuition for a private school. This year the city spent $100 million to educate about 4,000 kids in this situation. If seats do not open up in time, that number will go from 4,000 to 15,500, almost four times the number of children they currently pay for, which might translate into an added $400 million dollars on an already financially strapped school system and city.
The NY Daily News reports that special education advocate Patricia Connelly is less than optimistic:
“I haven’t seen a single kid get a placement letter. As far as I can tell, they haven’t found seats for any of these kids.”
You can imagine how disturbing it must be for the parents of over 15,000 special needs five-year-olds who have no idea where their child will be attending school in a little over two months. While the prospect of being afforded a free placement at a private school may seem attractive, parents have no clue if or when their child will get one as of now. It is also an unfair ruling that some special needs kids would get a free private education while some don’t, simply because the Department of Education screwed up.
In a perfect world, every kid would have the chance to be privately educated and given the attention and care that they deserve. When a major school system has no way to place special needs children in a two month time frame, I fail to believe that these kids will get as much as they deserve. I only hope that some of these special needs kids won’t be suddenly deemed mainstream just so they will be given a seat in class.
For the children that will ultimately be given vouchers for private school, it can be difficult to find a spot in the private schools at so late in the year:
Kids who receive vouchers for a free private school education often have difficulty finding seats at about 50 schools around the city that are qualified to take them, said Meredith Madon, a Manhattan attorney who represents the families of children with special needs. “It’s a heartbreaking situation for these families,” said Madon.
Kids in general need structure and many children are nervous about starting school, even when everything is set in stone. Add special needs kids (who often require more organization and structure to feel calm) and a mad dash for a spot in a school, and you not only have a recipe for disaster, but thousands of already challenged children who are going to start out their educational life on a pretty terrible note.
Image: NYC.Gov
Preschool for Kids: Is early childhood education necessary?
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2 Comments
Dada rocks commented on Jun 18 11 at 3:15 pmI hate how broken the education system in NYC is sooooo broken. I think we need to start education earlier the whole debate of starting later is silly…. We’re 17th place for education – globally we’re getting are ass kicked – we need to step up and reform our education system.
TLD commented on Jul 09 11 at 2:41 pm“I only hope that some of these special needs kids won’t be suddenly deemed mainstream just so they will be given a seat in class.” You hit it right on the spot. Many older children are deemed “mainstream” when they get to high school, because of Bloomberg’s and Klein’s obsession with breaking up large high schools, which have the capacity to deal with large enrollments and can accommodate self-contained classes of children who have at least average intelligence but who have learning-disabilities. It was ill-advised then, and it’s still ill-advised now. It’s illegal to change a child’s IEP without at least a conference with the IEP subcommittee, but many principals are forcibly changing IEPs without the parents’ consent, and without consulting teachers or specialists. Why do they make these changes? Budgets. You can’t have a 15:1 class in a school where 5 kids are mandated for it, so the solution is to just change those 5 kids to another classification. Why not send them to a school that CAN accommodate a 15:1 mandate? Because of “school choice.” Bloomberg is so damned concerned about his legacy. Thousands of kids forced into the wrong placements. That’s Bloomberg’s legacy.
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