With Fraud Already Present, Was ALEC Involved in Expanding McKay Scholarships to Florida’s Special Needs Kids? | Scathing Purple Musings

With Fraud Already Present, Was ALEC Involved in Expanding McKay Scholarships to Florida’s Special Needs Kids? | Scathing Purple Musings:

With Fraud Already Present, Was ALEC Involved in Expanding McKay Scholarships to Florida’s Special Needs Kids?

by Bob Sikes

I don’t often use letters to the editor in a blog post, but Loudon, Tennessee’s Joy Pachucki writes something that may be important to Florida families. The expansion of McKay scholarships by Rick Scott and the state’s republican legislators to include any child with an IEP is in its first year. Pachucki writes to the Knoxville News:

Parents of kids in special education beware: Special education is under attack by the GOP across the nation via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a powerful coalition of corporations and right-wing legislators, and viewable on the web site ALEC Exposed.

ALEC has worked out plans to trick families into giving up their federally protected educational benefits in exchange for cheap vouchers that can be used in unregulated, fly-by-night academies.

The best example of this is Florida’s (Jeb Bush) McKay special education scholarship fund, and the best proposed bill is AB110 in Wisconsin.

How does the scam work? “It is predicated on trading on parents’ legitimate frustrations for what