Political Quotes

“this is an old topic for me, 25 years, speaking on the same subject, trying to encourage the Congress to put their money where their mouth was 24 years ago, when school districts were promised that if they participated in the Federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act they would receive 40 percent of the excess cost in order to fund special education programs to educate a child with a disability, which may be two, three, five, ten, twenty times greater than to educate a non-disabled student. Obviously, that was not done. We got up to 6 percent. In the last 3 years, fortunately, we have been able to get huge increases, which gets us all the way up to 12 percent. And, hopefully, by the end of this year, it will be 15 percent, and we still have a long way to go. What does it mean when we do not fund what we promised? It means that the local school districts must raise millions of dollars in order to fund a mandate that came from the Federal level, a mandate if they decided to participate. I realize that no matter how much money we put up, we can never fully fund even our 40 percent unless we deal with the number of people who are placed in special education programs, many of which only have a reading problem and, therefore, really should not be there. I hope that some of the early childhood programs that we have put into effect on the Federal level will help eliminate those who get into special ed simply because of those reading problems.”