High hopes turn to disappointment as families find program is too little, too late.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Georgia’s much ballyhooed new program to provide vouchers for students with disabilities to attend private schools may not benefit a lot of students this year. The problems:

• Voucher payments are often meager in comparison with private school tuition costs; and
• The program didn’t get started until three months after private schools had filled their class rosters.

Parents had hoped that the vouchers would provide students with disabilities with a ticket out of low-performing schools. Of 199,509 eligible students statewide, officials report that only 5,760 applied for the vouchers. It is not clear how many will actually receive them.

“I’m not finding a lot of parents accepting it,” said Chris E. Vance, an Atlanta lawyer who has represented hundreds of children in special education disputes across the state, “unless they were already planning to place their children [in private school] themselves.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under school vouchers, special education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.