Steven Holt: “The gentleman and our colleagues have made some very good points. I would just like to emphasize that someone has to pay…”

“The gentleman and our colleagues have made some very good points. I would just like to emphasize that someone has to pay for this. I actually take issue with this phrase that we hear so often, unfunded mandate. This is not something imposed by the U.S. Congress. What happened was in 1975 there had been a series of court cases that made it clear that the local schools had an obligation to provide education, had an obligation to provide free, appropriate, excellent education. Among those cases was Park versus State of Pennsylvania, Mills versus D.C. Board of Education. Schools understood that this meant enormous expenses for them because more than 25 years ago, when Congress passed IDEA, it was to give hope to children with disabilities, and the law has been really very successful in that respect. Before its passage, children with disabilities were either segregated from other students, given inferior education or too often received no education at all. There is an American ideal of excellent education for all, and the courts made that clear. What Congress did in 1975 was to look around the country, find the average cost of educating students, the average cost of educating students with special needs, and made the average estimate that it was about twice as expensive on average to educate the students with special needs. So Congress codified this already-existing need.”