“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory”.

- Franklin P. Adams

“The trouble with most folks isn’t so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain’t so.”

- Josh Billings

There are times in life when doing the right thing can actually save you money. I can’t begin to list all of the examples of how this has played out in my personal life, but I would like to discuss this in terms of public education. You may realize by now that I am not a writer, and I am certainly not a diplomat or politician. I am an artist married to a writer, and we are trying to raise 3 children – one with special needs – in my home state of Texas.

The Texas state legislature meets only once every 2 years. It’s a wild time, and if what you need to happen doesn’t happen during the session, you have a long wait before you’ll get another shot. Sounds simple enough, until you talk about critical education bills that need to happen before your kid ages out of the system.

Last session, I decided to get heavily involved in the process. We had been sucker punched by the public elementary school, and we were fast realizing that the private schools we could afford for our son were not prepared for his relatively minor but still very significant special needs. I contacted our newly-elected state representative to discuss the Ohio Autism Scholarship program and to let him know that this is the sort of thing that would allow us to get our son into a program where he could actually learn. Autistic kids don’t just “not learn” when they’re in an inappropriate classroom setting – they regress quickly, they lose previously acquired skills, they are destroyed. The state representative’s name was Allen Vaught, and we kept in touch, sometimes emailing 10 or more times per day throughout the legislative session. Allen has a good heart. He understands my family. There is no way he could not get it after all the time I spent communicating directly with him 2 years ago. A bill called SB1000 modelled on Ohio’s successful program was filed by Senator Florence Shapiro, and that’s when it all fell apart for Allen and me. SB1000 would have allowed us to transfer our son within the district, into another district or take a certain amount of money to an appropriate private education. The private education thing is supposed to be offered up when the public schools cannot educate a child – but in Texas, federal education law is usually ignored. Allen’s campaign was largely paid for by a group called the Texas Parent PAC, and when the PAC said jump, Allen obediently said how high.

In the process, he threw my son under the bus, and by the end of the session, Allen could no longer look me in the eye. I am a registered Democrat. I gave him my vote and months of time that would have been better spent trying to learn how to home school my son. After all, I’m not a teacher. To his credit, Allen asked me to find the program that was right for my son in any of the 4 school districts in our state house district 107 and he would ensure that my son got into that program. He essentially offered to do for me what I could have done for myself with SB1000. I think the last thing I asked before the session ended was if it would be alright to give his contact info to the rest of the autism parents in the state so he could hook them up this way, as well. Haven’t heard from him since.

So it’s election time again, and a few things have changed in our world. A virtual academy charter school option was created for Texas. I enrolled my son, and he is doing better in this setting than he has in any other setting we’ve been able to access. The man running against Allen Vaught is a guy named Bill Keffer. I decided to investigate Keffer since Vaught is too ashamed (and rightly so) to continue speaking with me. I quickly learned that Bill Keffer was our state representative before losing the spot to Vaught (remember all that Parent PAC money?). I also learned that Keffer was on the House Education Committee and worked on legislation that eventually brought my son’s current school into existence. It got him back in school along with hundreds of other children. It’s not perfect, but it exists as an option for parents. We really don’t need perfection, just progression toward more education and less suckyness. There are 2 people on Bill Keffer’s staff who have a lot of knowledge about autism – one is a former autism classroom teacher, and the other is the parent of an autistic child. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

I decided to meet with him to find out if this was some sort of gimmick to overthrow Vaught or what – and I was astonished to realize that Bill Keffer really doesn’t know all that much about autism. He just fell into this situation where he is surrounded by it on a daily basis, kinda like me – and it made him eager to learn more. I now have 2 candidates who “get it” – only I now know for sure that Allen Vaught, despite his understanding of the situation, is not going to do anything for our kids. He’s a tool of the folks who paid his way. I’m not sure if Bill Keffer will be any better, but education is my focus since it’s the single most daunting task in my everyday life, and I do know that Keffer gets it – and Keffer isn’t the Texas Parent PAC’s golden child, Allen Vaught. Voting helpless Allen Vaught out of office is a step toward less suckyness – and that’s what we want!

We talk about The Wizard of Oz a lot in the local autism community, because there are so many flying monkeys to handle all the time. Sticking with that theme, if we could take the tin man with his new heart and merge him with the scarecrow and his nice new brain, we could have a district that cares about the education of all of our children. And we could have a district that refuses to throw more cash at Dallas ISD (as well as the others) without strict financial accountability. There’s a lot of money being spent on private law firms because of the failure to provide an appropriate education to special needs students. Dallas, Garland, Richardson and Mesquite are all guilty of this. The law firms cook up trouble between the schools and the parents so the parents withdraw the kid, leaving tax dollars behind, or – better yet – file due process and let the big public dollars flow to the private law firms. It’s big business, and I know I don’t want to throw more cash at school districts when this sort of fiscally irresponsible scheme is the norm.

If you’ve bothered to read this far, please understand that I am still a registered Democrat. But I’m the kind who’s done a little thinking. When parents of special needs children have enough options to get their kids safely and appropriately educated, your money will not go to fund all of these private law firms. Your tax dollars will go to education, not to bottom feeders who benefit from conflict. I don’t expect people to stop everything and care about my kid. I’m not naive. But you’re throwing money away when you continue feeding the public schools without addressing this kind of misuse of taxpayer dollars.

My kid was 8 when I got involved. He’s 10 now. A few more legislative sessions and he’ll be an adult. Get these kids appropriately educated now so they can become productive, tax-paying citizens as adults. If we continue funding private law firms disguised as public education, many of these kids will land in state-funded group homes as adults, and boy will you pay then. Let’s not get all emotional when the Allen Vaughts of the world squawk about school choice or vouchers or anything else that will create more options for these kids to get an education. Let’s think about where the money is really going and take this opportunity to have a heart and use our brains.