May I amend that statement to "The cost of educating an average student K-12 is less than $4,000 per year."
One of the reasons that the cost-per-student gets inflated is due to the special populations that schools are required to pay for. For instance, I'm writing an educational plan for a student whose doctor wants her placed in an institution for continuing depression. He is fighting tooth and nail to get the schools to pay for it, rather than the family's insurance. The cost will be about $300K... a year...for one student. I wrote another plan last year for a set of triplets who are all in an institution, and have been for years, due to severe MR issues - the county spends about 250k on each of them. And will until the year in which they turn 22.
Put a few of those into any system and the average cost increases to levels that leave people scratching their heads with "Wait...how can possibly cost $10k per student in a classroom?"
In the case of your wife's school, and any school really, it doesn't cost more than about 5k per student - but some students cost way, way more than 5k
If the parents' insurance policy will pay, it should. If not, it sounds to me (without knowledge of whatever Virginia regulations may apply) like a case for Medicaid. What standing does her doctor (presumably her psychiatrist) have to fight tooth and nail to get the schools to pay for it? Is this a case where he wants a blank check from the public schools? In which case, he is hoping that future generations of his descendants, yet to be conceived, will bless the memory of his financial practicality in taking advantage of the system. $500 or more per hour for as many hours as he, in his infinite wisdom, sees necessary to have himself compensated.
I will certainly admit that I have known personally some capable and dedicated public school teachers and even administrators, but the word "psychiatrist" and the word "integrity" or the words "worth his/her fees" do not belong in the same sentence. Freud? Jung? Whoever!
I am a natural born cynic and think far less of psychiatry than I have ever thought of public schools. If I lived nearby, I would gladly seek to free public education of such a burden.
I gather that MR means Mental Retardation. $250 K per year per triplet? Quite likely but what do the triplets get out of that expenditure? This raises a separate question as to "mainstreaming." It is fashionable to view those who are Down's Syndrome folks as needing to be "mainstreamed" for reasons of "self-esteem" (read to allow budget cuts so that the politicians can squander those dollars on other projects like bicycle paths or kayaking facilities). Down's Syndrome folks may well need help but the only reason it comes out of your education budget is this "mainstreaming" fantasy. Likewise those who have serious mental illness.
When those with serious mental illness are "mainstreamed," we get Sandy Hook or Columbine or the Gabby Giffords incident or many other less publicized tragedies. There are mental hospitals that have been abandoned all over the US. Two that come immediately to mind are one at Waterbury, Vermont, used occasionally to hold surplus criminal prisoners and (sit down before you read this) the small town of Newtown, Connecticut of which much smaller Sandy Hook is a subsection. The Newtown facility is used regularly now as something of a prison.
My reference to $4,000 as the cost of educating a student was as to my wife's school not the public schools. The public schools have many more instances of required spending, such as: school nurses, the football program, band, cultural trips to New York or other major metropolitan centers of art, music, sculpture, etc., a taxpayer paid junior year abroad in Europe (Greenwich, CT public schools as long ago as 1971).
That last one is a particular favorite. When leftwingers sued to try to force a judicial decision which might force Connecticut to drastically raise public education spending so as to force the enactment of a state income tax, the plaintiffs argued for essentially EQUAL educational spending whether a public school student resided in Darien, New Canaan, Wilton, Weston (all among America's most affluent towns) or resided in the urban slums of New Haven, Bridgeport, Norwalk or Hartford or destitute towns in Eastern Connecticut. When Greenwich hired an attorney to argue before the State Supreme Court that if Greenwich taxpayers elected officials who ran the junior year in Europe program, that was Greenwich's business. The leftist plaintiffs responded that junior years in Europe paid by taxpayers should be available to every Connecticut student or none which would mean state funding because poor towns in Eastern Connecticut could NEVER afford such frills.
The argument over junior years in Europe gave many Connecticut citizens an entirely new perspective. The State Supreme Court made a decision, IIRC, which said that junior years in Europe were up to any town wanting to grant one but need not be state funded. The court also ruled that educational funding on a state level was inadequate to guarantee to each child a "free public education" under a new constitution enacted in 1965 only six years before the decision, that at least the basics of education had to be equally available everywhere and the state would have to pay a LOT more than it had been paying.
A state tax on wages and salaries (Connecticut's first ever) was enacted in the early summer of 1971 (7/1/71) illegally since the legislature was required to adjourn by June 30. That tax was repealed in a special session in late July before it would have been effective on 10/1/71. That was the result of a genuine political revolution led by then conservative big city newspapers everywhere but Hartford. The state income tax was next and permanently enacted in 1991 and, together with utterly obscene levels of public squander on the things liberals love, has rendered even Connecticut a smoldering economic ruin.
God bless!
Up until two weeks ago I was the chair of the Teaching assistance team. Earlier this year I had to send a child for a full evaluation because "Mommy dearest" kept claiming that he was ADD and Learning disabled at the same time. The child is actually L.A.Z.Y.
This required a full psychological, physiological, and Social evaluation. Interviews with the parents, siblings, and everyone else residing in the house.
Total cost $5000.00 to find out that the student is perfectly normal and is just unmotivated.