Posted on 05/18/2008 12:31:17 PM PDT by Dawnsblood
Rebecca Maykish is 17 and dreads school so much that she stopped going regularly.
In fourth grade.
Those days off have come at a price to her school district and the Palmerton taxpayers who support it. Since 2004, the Palmerton Area School Board has authorized payments of more than $45,000 to help Rebecca make up for her missed school days. Rebecca's mother, Barbara, has used the money for at-home tutoring and education software purchases. She has also spent it on modeling classes for Rebecca, subscriptions to teen magazines, and travel to New York and Toronto with a summer camp.
All of the expenses were approved by the district.
Until December, Rebecca's education was paid through a compensatory education fund, which is supported through local property taxes and controlled by the school board. Compensatory education funds are distributed to students whose school districts have failed to give them an appropriate education, as required by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
(Excerpt) Read more at mcall.com ...
Because her daughter has gone the past year without any formal education, Barbara Maykish said she thinks she might need another compensatory education fund.
How Special.
Sounds like Barbara has the school officials by their compensatory fund already... The perfect solution is unforunately illegal in Kalifornicate. What you have is a spoiled child raising a spoiled child in her image.
From reading the article, it appears that the district didn't want to play this game, but some official from the state dept. of ed. ordered them to pay the woman.
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That’s what I’m talking about.
A little of the old belt would have cured this problem.
I wonder if the school district had a big bullying problem.
The girl could have been threatened or abused, and this was the payment to prevent a lawsuit.
This must be some kind of sick twisted joke right???!!! Anyone checked Snopes?
Goes to show everyone can become a victim. To top it off, government sanctions it. Of course, it is not their money that pays for litigation it is the taxpayer who must pony up for this BS.
It turns out, every one of her assignments so far has been to provide in-home instruction to a child who is home due to being stressed out or just afraid to go to school.
One of the children was too stressed out to take the spring high-stakes standardized test and was out of school during the review sessions. Her youngest assignment was a first grader. She said that students in these situations are entitled, by law I guess, to some number of days of tutoring.
That’s crazy - what needs to happen is that Rebecca simply gets “incomplete” grades and either bones up and goes to class, gets a GED, or drops out and suffers the consequences of her own actions. This isn’t something for which the taxpayer should be paying.
"The expenditures were paid under the terms of an order that gave virtually total discretion to the parent to determine what was educationally necessary," he said.
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Palmerton School Board President Carl Bieling Jr. said he and the board approved the payments because district administrators told them they were permitted under the terms of the compensatory education fund. He added that the expenses were first approved by former members of the board.
But he said he was bothered that Rebecca and her mother were receiving so much money.
Now they know how the average taxpayer feels about pouring money into the black hole that is government.
But what a disaster. This girl can't complete a full year of school because of her phobia, which has apparently gone untreated - I didn't see anything in the article that mentioned treatment, only diagnosis. But even with the awards from the school district, she hasn't managed to even learn the basics, because her mother has spent the money sending her off to self-esteem-boosting exercises that have yielded nothing. And without those basics, how on earth is she going to read and fill out a job application?
That's what welfare is for, I suppose.
I HATE always being right about such things! Couldn't Congress & the courts prove me wrong, by being sensible, just once?
Universal education gone wild...and dumbed down....just what the socialist Dewey envisioned: leadership by the elites and the proletariat who pays for this abomination too stupid to do anything about it.
The mother in the story is unemployed...maybe she has it too.
One can only imagine. Nobody ever paid me to homeschool my kids and financed trips for us.
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