Ellington

In reporting about the various proposals over special-needs education in the Legislature, we've heard many disturbing stories. The most frightening involved local school officials who thought the best way to deal with a distraught elementary-school aged child was to call the cops and threaten the student with jail.

Then, there were the tales of parents in limbo, stuck between public schools that are obviously ill-equipped to serve special-needs students and the high costs and uncertainty of moving their children to the private-school system.

As we talk to these families, the desperation in their voices is painfully inescapable. It would be unconscionable to exploit that anxiety for political gain. However, recent legislative deliberations, which come in the context of a larger debate over Mississippi's education crisis, have a whiff of just that brand of election-year pandering in the same way politicians try to churn fears about terrorism with soccer moms in presidential election years.

That needs to stop. While we don't question anyone's sincerity in doing more to help Mississippi's special-needs students and their parents, we are baffled as to why so many of the proposed answers tend to fall into the category as same-old same and why other smart reforms to the existing public-education system fail to even come up, much less gain traction.

For example, with the amount of data that now exist about the harmful effects of zero-tolerance policies, including overuse of police for discipline issues, it's downright shocking that any school is still using law enforcement to deal with children who present behavioral challenges.

At the same time, the continued underfunding of public schools in Mississippi has forced some districts to choose between fixing heating systems and hiring new teachers. For those schools, training school staff on interventions for special-needs students sounds like a luxury, like supplying every teacher with a Rolex. It's not that they don't want to; often, they just don't have the resources.

In special education, as with most things, the best solutions are not either-or. We shouldn't choose between classroom disruptions and throwing kids in jail, or between poorly equipped and improperly trained public schools and private schools that are not necessarily any better equipped to teach special-needs students (and where the use of vouchered public money would be even less accountable to the public).

Right now—admittedly this is at least partly due to politics—a rigorous debate is taking place about special education. But neither legislators nor local school officials need to reinvent the wheel to improve special-needs education. Adequate funding of public schools, better training for teachers and other school personnel, eschewing zero-tolerance and reforming the alternative school system could go a long way.

And because of the energy going into debate, if there ever was an opportunity for bipartisan leadership in Mississippi, it's this one.