Reply to Yet another teacher has left BASIS and parents are in the dark

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Reply to "Yet another teacher has left BASIS and parents are in the dark"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There are folks who oppose charters, because they draw students away from the public school system, and as such they look for anything they can latch on to in order to try and attack charters - in this case it seems to be IDEA.

And then, they make comments suggesting things like "an accelerated STEM school goes against IDEA" as well as bringing up immersion schools like Yu Ying.

But here's the thing:  IDEA is only about modifying and changing things for special needs students - NOT the rest of the students - and even there, it's only to meet the minimum educational requirements of the jurisdiction for those special needs students.  IDEA can't be used as a club to force schools to change the rest of their model or curriculum.

So, it doesn't matter if it's an immersion school for ancient Uzbek language or if they teach Advanced Genomics in 5th grade - none of that is relevant to IDEA, as under IDEA, the school only has to make the basic "general education" curriculum per the state standard accessible to special needs students.

IDEA should not have purview over the rest of the school, nor should it have purview over those students who are not special needs.  It doesn't matter what a school like Basis or Yu Ying is, where it comes to the rest of the picture beyond the minimum standards.  Yu Ying for example would be well within its rights to put special needs students in a class with no Chinese at all - because Chinese is outside of the minimum jurisdictional educational standard.   Basis could also plow forward with an accelerated program without having any special needs students because it's also outside the minimum educational standard.  They would only have to meet the minimum with special needs students.

As such, unless a special needs family knows for sure that the school will (voluntarily on their part, because they don't have to) offer to work with special needs students on any of the specialized or accelerated curriculum beyond the minimum standard (because IDEA only requires them to address the minimum standard) then I think it may be at best be a crap shoot, or at worst be a waste of time, to seek out a specialized charter with a special needs student expecting accommodations where it comes to those specializations outside the minimum standard - which makes one wonder what the point of bothering even was.[/quote]
+1[/quote]

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