Leave it to Michigan. Special Education in most cases falls outside the realm even of education; if you're dealing with a special-needs son or daughter, the teachers and staff who help you not only have the education and training necessary to help your child be their best, they're part of YOUR support structure. Yours and your child's. But, apparently, there are no sacred cows when the budget is in crisis, and if Michigan does decide to reduce the amount of funding and support available to special education programs, well, primarily, I can see the parents who can afford to go to other states, doing so because they can, and because they do indeed need all the help they can get. The parents who can't afford to move? Dunno. Prison, like the pre-colonial British did with debtors? Turn Mackinac Island into a special-education colony? Unfunded, just cede the land, and let the parents and children do as they wish? Okay, maybe my brain is going all "Lord of the Flies" on this one, but come on! Underfunding education has already given us things like a population that thinks that Adidas shoes are American-made, (they're made in Germany, folks,) and people who couldn't even find South Korea on a map. Do we really want to dull our American competitive edge that much more? I almost see an exodus AWAY from America happening in the future. I won't be so bold as to say it's going to happen, but it sure is gettin' ugly out there. We're being led as a country by a man who can't SPELL democracy, much less run one. George Bush is a great example of money and power run amok, style over substance, more than anything else. ESL and correctional education; maybe I am on the right track after all.
And, yeah, I 'm probably saying so, as much as anything, because such a move WOULD affect me personally, but can you blame me? Particularly given the quandry I've been in about which way to go? It doesn't help the cause any. On other fronts is also the news that parents of some autistic children are now out for money, because the word is out that Autism may be caused by a Mercury-based drug preservative that hasn't been used for the last five years. And to top it all off, the upshot of all this is that the judicial system is charged with proving something that science can't even definitively prove! And I thought being in Korea was like being down the rabbit hole. There's something just a little psychotic about the whole state of affairs. I guess, as always, time will tell what REALLY happens, but every move I see made at the moment, scares me that much more.