Mom +6, yes, you’re right. (If you like, go back and read my earlier posts on this subject.)
In order to get any sort of help for your autistic kid, and keep them from being mainstreamed, you usually have to fight your local school’s administration like a tiger to get them to listen to you. Otherwise, your child will be mainstreamed—against your will—or shuffled off to some institution-style school, where they’ll just keep him locked up for a few hours, and won’t interact with him, or teach him a thing.
It would be nice if, say, some private enterprise would create special schools for special kids, but, whenever the subject is brought up, somebody will coo, “Oh, but the public schools are taking care of that.” (Yeah. Right.) In California, home schooling is slowly, but very surely, being cut off as an escape for anybody who wants to get their kid out of the school system, whether said kid is special needs or not.
And, as you point out, parents of special ed kids pay taxes too. And abuse of all kids in the school system appears to be becoming worse and worse.
It’s not the kids who are the problem. It’s the adults.
By the way, I like Xanthippe’s suggestion; all those in favor of beating and humiliating kids to make them mind will, of course, agree that putting adults into the stocks when they’re “difficult”, pelting them with mud and rotten tomatoes, humiliating them and beating them when they act up or make a mistake would be a fine and salutory way indeed to run society.
