To the editor:

As members of the leadership team of the Special Education Advisory Committee for the Barrington Public Schools, we write in response to Heather Crosby’s letter entitled “Ten ways to make local schools better.” We will not be silent when children with special needs are callously discussed as items on the wrong side of a balance sheet.  

In number nine of her “top ten,” Ms. Crosby bemoans the fact that Barrington spends 27 percent more per special education student than the state average, while praising the district for spending less than the state average other students. She goes on to imagine the “$2.5 million saved . . . every year” if we were to reduce special education spending to the state average.

Elsewhere in her letter, she suggests that the school committee and administration should “get some expertise” to manage their accounting practices. Expertise would also be helpful in any discussion of special education students, services, and funding.  

The funding of special education supports and services is complicated and often in flux. Services may be reimbursed by Medicaid (though this is now under threat with the newly proposed healthcare bill—the same bill that Ms. Crosby refers to as a “law … that should afford significant savings”), federal grant, or state funds. No one disputes, however, that students with significant special needs do have higher educational costs, and that the local community bears a substantial portion of that burden. There was, however, no attempt to present or understand this complex system of reimbursement in Ms. Crosby’s letter.

More complicated than funding are the services and the students themselves. Was there any thought to where those cuts would come from? The services our children receive are federally mandated services for students to be able to access the curriculum. Teams of professionals determine student needs individually and with great care. Families and schools often disagree, even in an excellent district like ours. The meetings that determine services are grueling for all—particularly for parents.  

Suggesting a 27 percent cut to special needs services, with no thought toward what that would mean to these students and their welfare, is, simply put, offensive. Any student costing Barrington $80,000 a year would love nothing more than to wake up one day able to cost $12,000. Any parent of a student with these needs would love nothing more than to see those burdens lifted from their child.  

We would all do well to come together in times of crisis rather than turning on the weak. There is a real ugliness to putting a price tag on the head of the high needs population of the town. Part of being a community—a civil society—is the will to make us all better. Some of us need more support than others—the elderly, the sick, and yes, the disabled.  

In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.

Margaret Reid

Barrington

Rose Murrin

Barrington