In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker created a proposal to make a school choice voucher program for students who have special needs. A group called Stop Special Needs Vouchers is protesting against the proposal. The group, which includes parents, feel that the plan would end up making it harder for students who have special needs to get the support they require at public schools.
A school voucher is a controversial topic for many reasons. There is potential for people to object to the system that is used to determine whether or not a child qualifies for a voucher, to object to the funding aspects that are connected to the voucher, or to object about the very existence of a voucher system. It all depends on the details.
According to Dictionary.com a school voucher is “a government cash grant or tax credit for parents, equal to all or part of the cost of educating their child at an elementary or secondary school of their choice”. It may also be called an “educational voucher” or a “scholarship”.
In Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has released a proposed expansion of the Wisconsin Choice, (a school voucher program). His plan would create a school voucher program for students who have special needs.
The plan would invest more money into private school vouchers (but not for public schools). The concept is that this would enable parents of kids who have special needs to have more choice about where their child can attend school. It would help to pay for the tuition at a private school that was better able to educate their child than the public schools were.
A group called Stop Special Needs Vouchers, and some parents, are protesting this school voucher proposal. They have concerns. Many want Wisconsin to improve the public schools so that these schools would be better able to meet the requirements of students who have special needs. They feel that it makes more sense to add funding to the public schools for the purpose of these kinds of improvements than it does to send some of that funding to private schools through the voucher system.
Another concern has to do with how the vouchers will be used. Public schools are legally required to accept all students. Private schools are not.
There is potential that the private schools will choose to only accept students who have milder disabilities, and refuse the ones who have moderate or severe special needs. This would leave the public schools with a situation where they have a higher percentage of students in Special Education that require a lot of assistance, and fewer funds to provide the assistance with.
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