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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (344763)	1/18/2003 11:38:44 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

No, I think your son will be a valuable member of society because of his mother's love and concern for him. Our kids went to public schools. Our daughter left while still a sophomore and went out on her own, but not until we petitioned the state superintendent to let her take the GED as an underage child. She did and passed it well enough to get into college. It took her fifteen more years, but now she's a better teacher than all but a handful of her own teachers put together. Special needs children need to be taken care of with intelligence, not blind sympathetic well-meaning ineffective measures. Sometimes mainstreaming them is the worst thing for them, sometimes not. When our daughter's class took on special needs children they consumed so much time that the other kids got short shrift. I'm not familiar with the needs your son has, but when my wife substituted at a special needs school those kids were loving and joyful. I think they need a school that can make their lives better, not mollify utopian sensibilities. There is a young man who works in our building, obviously mentally challenged. It's a big mistake to try to engage him because he cannot handle it. He empties the trash baskets in the building, and his work requires the attention of a person who could probably do the job faster by himself. But that young man has a bank account, lives in his own house, and wants for nothing. This is because somebody who cared for him made it their business to make him as independent as he could possibly be. That's the kind of intelligent thinking that I think needs to go into our public and private schools.

To: epicure who wrote (344763)	1/19/2003 11:58:44 AM
From: goldworldnet	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

I know my kids cost more for the school system than most. As is happens, I pay school taxes in 2 different counties because of property I own. Public schools have a legitimate fear of the potential that vouchers have for eventually leaving them with only the most difficult students. Non-imaginary comparisons could be made to urban flight here. The quandary, is that students with problems place a very real hardship on students without difficulties. No one wants a disadvantaged child to be left behind, but at the same time they do not wish for their own children to suffer because of these circumstances. Teachers are almost always to be commended for the job they do. They the are on the front line and in the trenches. Probably my chief complaint of the public system is non-productive bureaucracy and hierarchy that leaves teachers to fight the battle alone. Administrative bureaucracy should be drastically flattened and more teachers hired to reduce classroom size. Teachers are a minority in a bloated system, which desires to protect itself and this is my greatest grievance with the unions that seek less to serve the child than themselves. * * *