Everyone is talking vouchers. I heard a particularly interesting piece on NPR last week that talked about the struggles of one family in Florida trying to use vouchers to find a private school that would accept their child with special needs. (Spoiler alert: they couldn’t find one).
So let me just ask the question: What would vouchers mean for special education students in Los Angeles?
The state asks all private schools to report whether they offer special education services in their Private School Directory.
There are 877 private schools in Los Angeles. Only 8% of them offer special education services.
Of those that do offer special education services, 70% are special education non-public schools. These schools tend to serve students with more intense special needs than you might find at a traditional public school. And, these schools are often free to most of the students because the local school district pays for the services as part of their IEP. For example, at STEM3 Academy, 75% of the students are placed by a district program.
There are also 2 private schools that offer special education in a home school environment.
However, if you have a student who has mild to moderate special needs, and would benefit from support but not a more restrictive environment, there are only 13 private schools in all of Los Angeles county that can meet those needs. And all of them are religious schools.
All of this is to reiterate (in case you haven’t heard it twenty times this week) that vouchers would require systemic change throughout private schools to make it an equitable program. If left as is, vouchers would simply act as a way to further segregate our students and stratify the learning landscape.