House Bill 1393, which passed the House recently, seeks to make it possible for voters in school districts to do, as a matter of policy, what Croydon was recently able to do on a one-time basis: Tell the school district what they can afford, rather than wait to be told how much will be demanded from them.
That is, it allows voters to present their school district with a yearly budget instead of being presented by those districts with a yearly ransom.
The idea is simple. The town says what it can afford to spend on each student who is to be educated at district expense. (In Croydon’s case, that was $10,000, for reasons explained here.) Multiply that by the number of students, and that’s the budget.
The figure is an average amount, so the district might have to spend more on some students and less on others. In fact, spending more on some kids would require spending less on others.
Perhaps the most fascinating implication is that parents who are considering having their children receive special education services would be confronted with the fact that the extra funds required for those services — which are often more medical than educational — will be taken from the budget for the district, instead of added to the ransom for the district, as they are now.
They’re telling me that my child needs $160,000 worth of special education services. But that will take $2000 away from every other child in the district. That doesn’t seem right.
Whether its sponsors intended this or not, what HB1393 can do — and this is something that’s been needed for a long time — is to stop pitting parents against the voters in their districts, and start pitting the parents against each other instead.
Having said that, for some of the lower-cost alternatives that the Croydon school board is looking at, what may appear to be a ‘special need’ in our current assembly-line system often turns out to be a normal difference in development.
It turns out that when a student is met at his level — in a system that is focused on helping him pursue his own path, at his own pace — he needs fewer special services. Who could have guessed?
And ironically, for less money, the students get more individual attention than in a normal school setting.
So what started as a shock to a lot of parents is shaping up to be a win-win situation for taxpayers and students. I predict that by next year, a lot of other towns will be looking at Croydon, and using HB1393 to say: we’ll have what they’re having.
