Betsy DeVos Responds to Senator Patty Murray’s Question about SPED and Private Schools
I have been reading Michigan billionaire school choice champ and US ed sec nominee Betsy DeVos’ written responses to the 139 follow-up questions asked by Senate Health, Education, Labor and pensions (HELP) Committee member, Patty Murray.
Below is Murray’s question 104. It concerns any DeVos support for holding private schools that receive public money to the standard of also serving special needs students:
Have you ever supported efforts to require private schools that receive public funding provide the same rights and protections that traditional public schools must offer to the parents of children with disabilities? Yes or no. If yes, please describe the effort, including specific dates, details, and your personal involvement.
And DeVos’ response:
No educational program, public or private, is ideal for all students, especially students with disabilities. Even today, there are public school districts that do not have the services to meet the needs of all students with disabilities and suggest to those parents that they should enroll their students in nearby charter schools or the district arranges to have those students go to another district to have their needs met. So, let’s be honest. No individual public school provides the full range of high quality services for every student with a disability; this is true for private schools as well.Public school systems have the right to establish specialized programs in schools for students with specific disabilities and, through the IEP process, to assign students with specific disabilities to these schools in order to meet their needs more effectively. When this occurs, the public schools that do not offer these services within the system are not “discriminating” against the students with these disabilities.In far too many cases, the parents of students with disabilities in public schools are currently not satisfied with the services their children are receiving. In fact, public schools contract out education services for almostBetsy DeVos Responds to Senator Patty Murray’s Question about SPED and Private Schools | deutsch29:
