School districts have to pay

– Parents who put learning disabled child in private school win Supreme Court case

– NEA caught in the tar baby of not caring about special kids

Education Week reports that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, “Federal law authorizes reimbursements for private school tuition, even when a child has never received special education services from a public school.”

Apparently, the school district involved had, “Unreasonably failed to identify a child with disabilities.” Reports EdWeek, “The case raised the question of whether parents in a special education dispute with a school district may be reimbursed for ‘unilaterally’ placing their child in a private school when that child has never received special education services from the district.”

Had the court not intervened, local schools would have maintained the ability to unfairly deny services just to save money. But now, the local district will have to pay the costs for the special private school the student in question wound up attending.

As a consequence of the ruling, schools around the country will have to be more careful about denying special education services to students who really need them.

Naturally, the National Education Association, which fought against the court’s final position, is upset. The union thinks this will siphon money away from public schools. Maybe so, but if the union really cared about kids, they would realize that if proper services hadn’t been denied by public schools in the first place, this court case never would have happened.

As it is, this issue looks like a tar baby for the union, and the union and its members are “stuck” with the onus of looking like they actually condone failure by public schools to meet the needs of learning disabled students.