Oct 24 2008
Sarah Palin’s Special Needs Policy
Or lack of policy, more accurately.
Governor Palin gave a speech in Pittsburgh today. I’m scouring the Internet, but so far have been unable to find video of the speech, but I have found some information , including a transcript of the speech. After reading it, I still don’t see anything new or particularly substantial about her plans, and I find some of her words contradictory to her past actions.
She did mention fully funding IDEA - great, only 11 days before the election and about a year after Senator Obama mentioned his intention to do so. She talks about school choice for students with special needs, but some states already provide at least some level of choice. Expanding that would certainly be a nice idea, but with the spending freeze that Senator McCain called for during the debates, where is the funding coming from? Governor Palin claims that by reallocating funds already in the budget it can be done, but she neglects to give concrete information as to how.
In a Chicago Tribune article, quoted at Autismvox , her plans apparently include boosting early childhood funding until age 3, but what is supposed to happen to those children after age 3?
A couple of other issues are distressing. First, she claimed that the special education budget in Alaska would have been tripled by 2011, but a big chunk of that funding increase is for a program called the Alaska Youth Challenge Academy, a boot camp for dropouts with behavioral issues. Autism, Down’s Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, ADHD…none of these, nor a host of other special needs, are ‘behavioral issues,’ so where is the funding for those students who wouldn’t be served by being in a boot camp? When given the opportunity to advocate for individuals with special needs in Colorado, she opposed an amendment that would raise funds for those waiting for services - about 12000 people.
Governor Palin got in a dig at the Obama campaign, and her digs have been nothing but misrepresentations and double standards up to this point, by saying that his tax plan would tax trusts that parents establish for their special needs children, which is inaccurate. As one commenter on the CBS News blog said:
“Sure, any special needs individual who is lucky enough to have a NET EARNING of $250000 per year in INTEREST FROM TRUST FUND will be affected a bit. We are talking about trust funds well above $5.000000 here. How many kids will be affected, I wonder? I”d love to see statistics on that.
Posted by odnarusalka”Governor Palin fails to mention that the McCain-Palin health plan would allow insurers to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions. Finally, Governor Palin spoke about the fact that children with disabilites grow up and that there needs to be support for them as adults as well. Yet, she has yet to act on Maria Shriver’s call to Governors to employ disabled adults, and John McCain opposed the Community Choice Act, as mentioned in Becky Blitch’s blog. So once again, the sound bites sound interesting but there doesn’t seem like there is much in the way of specifics, action, accuracy or truth where the Governor is concerned. If this was her Hail Mary play, she seems to have just missed the goal.
An additional side note, she suggested that a way to pay for these projects amid an across the board spending freeze would be to “eliminate needless earmarks like researching fruit flies in Paris, France”. Fruit fly research, of course, is one of the key factors is discovering the proteins linked to causing autism.
You know what? I don’t think Sarah Palin has a clue about special needs children (or much VP stuff either for that matter but that’s another matter entirely) simply because she has had time to learn. Those of us with special needs children know the time it took to read through resources, learn about our special needs children and how they would/could develop. Sarah Palin’s baby was born so close to the VP nomination that she hasn’t had time to learn about her own child’s needs never mind the broader complex issues associated to these special kids. Since her baby was a few months old she’s been having to learn how to speak, how to dress, how to read scripts, and also find time to be a mom watching a son go to war, a daughter’s advancing pregnancy, and handle 2 middle girls and a baby. I haven’t much time for Sarah Palin as VP for the US, but I think she’s got her hands too full to have learned anything about the platform she’s trying to stand on.
Gosh that was more than a twopennath! Sorry!