Sen. Mike Rounds sat down for an interview with CNBC. The host pointed out that parents of special needs children are having a FAFO moment as they realize that the funding for their children’s education services are about to get cut. She went on to ask if the feds were going to ensure the necessary services are provided or if they were going to let the courts do it.
Rounds answered showed that he doesn’t know how government works and that it was not all about the children:
I think it, excuse me, with Special Ed as the example, nobody wants to take away funding for Special Ed but what you do find is that the federal government has always underfunded special education and so the folks at the local level end up picking up a significant amount of the costs involved right now and yet rather than becoming more efficient or direct with their funding and taking care of it we suddenly think that somebody at the federal level is going to make a better decision about how to help that young person than somebody at the local or state level. I think we’ve got to go back to allowing the state and local entities a little bit more authority.
While I think we could agree that no one wants to cut special education funding, the GOP are still going to do it because, frankly, they don’t give a damn. They’re more interested in taking care of needy CEOs and campaign donors, making sure their tax cuts are going to be big enough.
What Rounds is proposing is giving each state a block grant but without the requirements or monitoring in place. And I can promise you that these block grants are going to be smaller than what they are distributing now. Then the states will take these lesser grants and skim off the top for their campaign donors, Whatever money that is left is then divvied up among the school districts, leaving them to either hold a referendum to raise enough taxes to cover the differences or to cut services and ending up being ordered by the court to meet the mandated services.
In other words, the Republicans are making sure that the shit rolls downhill onto those further down the food chain.
I know this from having spent most of my career working with children with disabilities and their families getting the services and equipment they needed while Scott Walker was governor and he tried to to do the same damn thing. And I also know that when the parents of special need children finally figure out that their children are being wantonly put in harm’s way, it will be the GOP who will be having their own FAFO moment. One just does not piss off a mama – or a papa – bear and hope to get away with it.
