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The trust factor in Education

      Each month, the Kentucky Education Digest features a look at school choice from a parent’s perspective. This month’s testimony is from  Louisville residents David and Betsy Gibbs.

      Trust is something we all value – especially when it comes to those responsible for educating our children. It’s especially critical that parents of learning-disabled student be able to trust the school system their children attend.

      Unfortunately, Kentucky’s education system has done little to deserve my trust.

      Until we recently began home schooling our 13-year-old daughter Elizabeth, who has autism, the school district seemed more than willing to cash the large checks it received – money that was supposed to be used to provide her an education complete with the services required by her disability. Yet the system ignored her needs and our pleas for a proper evaluation to determine the best strategy for her education.

      School personnel handed us a copy of our parental “rights.” However, I found it quite difficult to convince them that those rights actually mean something.

      For instance, there is a regulation that allows parents to have an Independent Educational Evaluation (IEE) done for their child at public expense and without being required to state the reason for the action. But the school system ignored my IEE request for three months before the district’s special-education director denied approval for our chosen evaluator because he happened to live in California. The director ignored the fact that this expert had five separate degrees and 40 years of experience.

      Unfortunately, our local school officials saw my child as an opportunity to get more funding. Once admitted into the system, they wanted to keep her happy, pair her up with a few “friends” and give her passing grades until she reached the 12th grade. And despite the fact that she was clearly frazzled and had tear-stained eyes when getting into the car at the end of the day, we would receive comments entered into her log book by the school’s staff that she had a “great day!”

      Trust? Kentucky’s public-school system broke it with me the minute it began to see its own interests as being more important than our child’s needs.

      Parents deserve choices to send their special-needs children to a school that they trust. Without such confidence, little hope exists for improving the education of Kentucky’s neediest children.

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