Dive Brief:
- Mississippi legislators approved (30-18) a final version of a bill that would give a select number of special education students voucher dollars so they could attend private schools.
- Up to 200 SPED families could receive $6,500 next year to be used towards private school, therapy, or tutoring. The number of eligible families will increase by 500 each year until it hits its cap of 2,500 SPED students.
- Those opposed to the bill believe funds should be used to strengthen SPED programming within traditional public schools.
Dive Insight:
While voucher programs have been know to hurt the foundations of traditional public schools by bringing down enrollment and hurting the general sentiment and support for neighborhood schools, it is true certain programming is not always as funded and therefore effective in traditional public schools. Special education is one of those fields.
In Mississippi, this is particularly true. In November, the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi received $350,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in order to monitor the discipline of the state's disabled and minority students. According to Mississippi ACLU Executive Director Jennifer Riley-Collins, who spoke to the Clarion-Ledger, disabled students are almost six times as likely to be restrained at school than their non-disabled peers.