People Like You.

As always special education was on the cutting block, but this was only my first time attending a budget meeting.  I had lined up a sitter and rushed from work so I could attend.

It was last spring, and I never shared much from it because it wasn't the final meeting and I didn't want to go into a frenzy with so many things left up in the air.

However, recent events keep bringing me back to that meeting.

In particular the one board member who kept repeating, "It costs more to send these children to out-of-district schools than it does to send my son to Tufts!  Tufts, I'm talking about Tufts!".

I'm not joking.  The pack rat that I am still has the agenda and notes from that meeting and I wrote that line down and underlined it each time she said it.

She went off to say that she didn't understand why we had to pay this much for this population of children.  The Special Education budget was ginormous and she was appalled by it.

Yet, she did not approve of changing our current district's system to better accommodate more children so that they didn't have to travel to other districts.

First of all, if I could speak to this woman in person, I would like to congratulate her for having a son at Tufts.  She is obviously very proud of this and if I was his Mom, I would be too.

Secondly, I'd like to tell her to fuck off.  

It must be nice to have the dream of Tufts and know that with hard work, preservation, and a really good recommendation letter your child will get in.  It must have been nice to know that he would get the education he needed in a public school to go on to an Ivy League college so now you can sit there and try to deny my child and others like him an education just to help them become functionally independent adults. I don't know how that feels that I can just relax and know my son's education will be taken care of to some extent.  Thanks to people like you, I have to go to meetings and hire lawyers and be a constant presence in my son's school just to make sure he's being kept safe and not being given up on.  Being given up on because you all know he won't ever go to Tufts.

It's because of people like you that my friend's team called an IEP meeting to chop off two hours of his day at his special school to BETTER MEET THE NEEDS OF THE DISTRICT.   People like you that make the district think it's okay to take away TEN HOURS a week of specialized instruction from her son.

It's because of people like you that when a school gets put on a spending freeze the first thing they do is decide to try to amend IEPs to double-up kids so they won't get the individualized care that they obviously needed in the first place or it wouldn't have been in their IEPs.

Let's screw over our most vulnerable students, who can't defend themselves, who can't go home and tell their parents what their day was like, and who probably won't ever amount to anything.  We know they won't go to Tufts.

Like I said before, fuck off.