Well, they may be spending too much time on special needs kids in the OC, but my own experience has been that, so far from spending too much time, or effort, on special needs kids, all the school districts I’ve ever dealt with don’t want to spend any time on them at all—even when they supposedly have special ed classes set up, where teaching special needs kids wouldn’t impact on the regular students at all, and where they supposedly have aids to help the kids.
So far from being over-eager to help special needs kids, my experience has been that they don’t want to be bothered—although they will simultaneously insist that you MUST send your kid to their school, whatever his or her problems. After all, they lose tax dollars if you don’t. Don’t expect them to actually do anything to help them, however, and you’ll have to fight tooth-and-nail to get them into special classes where they can actually be helped.
If special needs kids are being dumped into regular classrooms, I suspect it’s because the school districts just don’t feel like going to the special effort to set up special classes for them, and/or because they’ve spent all the money earmarked for those programs redecorating the principal’s office, or setting up counseling programs to warn kids of the evils of smoking cigarettes, or helping those troubled youths who are actually beating up classmates, and bringing drugs to school.
I can certainly believe this of Newport Beach, which had an abominable school system when I was going there—and I wasn’t a special ed student.
I can’t help but think that this same “we just can’t be bothered” attitude extends to normal students students as well—hence the inglorious state of education at the moment.
As I keep saying, the problem is the adults, not the kids, special needs or otherwise.
