Monday, October 26, 2009

Illegal immigration, race and government programs

Baby Bop has a significant speech delay. When he was younger than 3 years old, he received an hour of speech therapy a week at our home through the Early Start program. Now that he is three years old, the local school district provides speech therapy. (As a side note: to qualify for services, the child must be below the 7th percentile in some area.) In our case, Baby Bop's expressive language skills fall at the 3rd percentile.

Today, I met a speech therapist at the school near my house and signed the paperwork for his IEP (Individual Education Program). During this process, I've purposely left blank certain sections of the paperwork. I've given no information about the other children in our household and I've not indicated Baby Bop's race.

The speech therapist asked if I would be willing to fill out the "race" portion. The school will receive more money if I indicated that Baby Bop is Hispanic/Latino. No matter which race I put, Baby Bop will received the same services. However, those services are somehow more valuable to the state if the child is Hispanic/Latino. The school gets even more money if Spanish is his primary language.

I just hate the way my tax dollars are spent.


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Technorati tags: illegal immigration, IEP, speech therapy, home education, parenting, children, education

2 comments:

Jacquie @ Joy Made Full said...

I have so many things I could say about that, but I too get so frustrated with how tax dollars are used.

Janine Cate said...

>I have so many things I could say about that...

I hear you. I decided that I didn't want to start a flame war, so I didn't point out some of the obvious ramifications of this policy.


"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Animal Farm