People Shouldn't Have Price Tags
Why FL and TX are Flying Migrants to Martha's Vineyard
One night a few years back, after too many drinks around our dining room table, a friend told us how he was recently recruited by his town’s superintendent to serve on the Board of Education. Newly enmeshed in the intricacies of the school budget, he was amazed that every penny in the multi-million dollar budget was already allocated towards items like teachers’ salaries and building maintenance with very little wiggle room for new innovative programs. In his working class community, taxes couldn’t be raised easily, so an unexpected emergency like a leaky roof could blow the budget.
He speculated about a potential emergency cost. “A family moves to town with an autistic kid, who needs to be sent to a special private school, and it’s $100,000 per year,” my friend exclaimed. “Over a million dollars, maybe two, in total for K-12. You know how many teachers I could hire for that!”
In our decentralized system of government, most social services, from education to housing, are provided by localities. And the people who run those local governments, like my school board friend, must write the checks and somehow make the spreadsheets work. One dollar for the autistic person means one fewer dollar for a prestigious AP program or a library program aimed at seniors. Some people fill up the tax coffers in a community, while others are very costly.
This crazy way of providing services in this country has reduced everyone to a number. What’s your number? Multiply your number of kids by the price of schooling at the local public school, the extra services they need, and then subtract your local taxes. Are you a positive or a negative? Reducing people to dollar expenditures is a terrible way of looking at our fellow human beings, but that how our screwed up political system works.
Children are expensive; in our town, 75 percent of the local tax budget goes to schools. Our superintendent is under constant pressure to keep the costs per student low, especially when the mayor gets jealous that he has a bigger budget than she does. (Weirdly, the non-elected superintendent is the most powerful local political official in our town, if you measure power solely based on the amount of money that they control.) So, if you have a child in a school district, the town spends anywhere from $14,000 to $30,000 per year on your child. If your child has special needs, it could be $100,000 or more per year.
If you are poor, you need housing, food, job training, transportation, and so on. The state pays for many of those expenses, but localities might provide those services.
There’s not enough affordable housing in our state, because of these same dynamics. Our town could easily build tall apartment buildings in our downtown area, enough to house a thousand people. We have the space. Developers are begging for these opportunities. We’re on a train line, so there’s an easy commute to jobs in New York City. The state provides incentives to build affordable housing. Yet, it doesn’t happen here or in any of the nearby suburbs.
In town council sessions and newspaper letters, people quite openly and without shame say that they don’t want to build these apartment buildings, because they will bring in the expensive type of people — special needs families, families with lots of kids and relatives, poor people who will need social services, people who can’t pay a lot of taxes. Sometimes they speak in code saying things like, “We don’t want our little Village to turn into an Ugly City.”
It’s tempting to say that this exclusionary practices are racist, and maybe they are, but I think it’s more about money. We’re white, but they don’t like us, because we have one of those expensive autistic kids.
This mentality is toxic and pervasive. I’ve been in school meetings with a low level administrator begging to get a little extra help for my son with reading and I will watch her pause and make quiet calculations. It’s obvious that she’s thinking to herself, “this kid has autism and will never be a great reader and has no future, so paying for an hour of help with a reading specialist will cost $100 per hour, while that money could be spent on a 6-year with dyslexia, who has a better shot at life.”
After watching a budget presentation that puts special ed expenditures on a separate line for everyone to see, parents at PTA meetings will stand up and ask, “how do we keep special education families from moving here?” Seriously. I’ve seen this happen.
Yes, Ron De Santis and other governors in border states are human scum for making political statements using real human beings. In their very distasteful way, they are giving voice to the mentality of every local political official in this country.
By putting migrants on buses and planes aimed for Martha’s Vineyard and Chicago, those Republican governors, like so many state and local government officials, put a price tag on humans. They are saying if you love undocumented immigrants so much, then you take them. You pay for their schools. You pay for their housing. You handle their children who have undergone so much trauma on their way up here that they will need twenty years of counseling, paid for by the local school district. (Seriously, that’s a real issue.) They are saying that it’s not fair for the federal government to make laws around immigration, but the price tag for those policies end up disproportionately falling on the towns located in that border areas.
The only way that people can rip the price tags off their foreheads is for the federal government to provide the funding for social services and maybe even to redistribute the higher needs people to places of their choosing. If the federal government actually fully funded IDEA, then maybe autistic families like mine wouldn’t be so marginalized. Maybe the migrant families wouldn’t be positioned like missiles into Democratic communities. I mean, some people will need services, which will cost money, but it would be better for those numbers to be hidden and less resented by neighbors and even friends.
LINKS
Pictures of a recent family trip to New York City.
Last week, I exposed to everyone my guilty secret…. I am kinda obsessed with the British Royal Family and all their dirt. (For the whole series of blog posts about the Royal Family, tag: royal mess. To start from the beginning, start here.) Here’s the latest: King Charles III is exiling Prince Harry for being an energy vampire. At the same time, Meghan Markle’s plans seem to be unraveling. I’m feeling sorry for them.
RIP Hilary Mantel. If you haven’t read Wolf Hall, you should. Here’s her wonderful essay on royal bodies.
Schools are going to be a big issue in the mid-term election. Families that felt the most pain during the pandemic are still mad.
The local running club aimed at old people like me has unexpectedly become a haven for young people in their 20s who have no other social outlets and are very lightly on the autistic spectrum. This oddball group of seniors (some are 70-year old marathoners) are beyond kind.
I have grown almost numb to the statistics showing how badly we treated children during the pandemic. The latest report from UNICEF.
I’m a huge fan of high school programs that help non-college bound students find careers. I think we’re going to start to see more high schools begin to diversify their offerings, which is awesome.
Watching: The Boys, She-Hulk
Shopping: I need a long 80’s style blazer and something green.
Cooking: A friend of mine served some amazing Duck Sauce Chicken at a BBQ recently. She covered chicken thighs with Chinese Duck Sauce, which she bought by the gallon in the Jewish section of the supermarket. Bake thighs at 350 on a sheet pan covered with the sauce and covered by aluminum foil. 1 hour in the oven. Finished over the BBQ to get nice grill marks.