PINE BUSH – It's a question that comes up frequently in these hard economic times when cuts in state aid to the Pine Bush School District are on many peoples' minds. Why does it take $100 million a year to educate 6,000 kids?

There's no easy answer to that question. For example, look at special education. The Assistant Superintendent for Instruction at the Pine Bush School District, Joan Carbone, notes that the district has "81 special education teachers, including nine speech therapists."

Some long-term teachers in the district can remember when special education was a much smaller component of the teaching staff. Today, the district has almost a thousand kids in special education, and the average cost per student is close to $19,000. So, what happened?

For the answer, we have to go back to the early 1970s. Then, only about 20 percent of children with disabilities were educated in public schools. Many states explicitly excluded blind, deaf, emotionally disturbed, and autistic children from public schools. Instead, such children tended to end up in state institutions where they received little or no educational services. In states that allowed them into the schools, these children were placed in separate facilities and, again, received little in the way of education.

Following court decisions demanding change, congress passed legislation, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1990, which was re-authorized by President George W. Bush in 2004.

Congress promised to fund 40 percent of the cost of implementing this act and its precursor, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975.

Roseanne Sullivan, Vice President of the Pine Bush Board of Education, explains that, "As of today, we only receive 17 percent of those costs from the feds. The promise was broken, and only exacerbated by No Child Left Behind."

Sullivan is right. Congress has never authorized more than 30 percent of the money needed to fund this altogether humane and reasonable legislation, thus turning it into the mother of unfunded mandates.

Sullivan also makes the other crucial point about special education. "Educating students with disabilities has come a long way in terms of emphasizing a moral and legal obligation to ensure that all students receive a proper and challenging education. IDEA took students out of restrictive environments — self contained, sometimes far from their home schools — and mainstreamed them into regular education classrooms, thus giving them the same opportunities which they could have in the real world."

America moved from a society that warehoused kids with disabilities to a society that makes an effort to bring them into the mainstream and give them the education they need to participate in society. But because congress never found the political will to come up with the money to follow the federal mandate, the costs were instead dumped on the state and then on the local taxpayers.

Another unforeseen aspect of this situation is well described by Joan Carbone, who was Director of Special Education for ten years at Pine Bush.

"We saw an increase in the numbers in the '90s. Three things came together on this: first, there has been an increase in autism. [Recent studies suggest as many as one in a hundred American children are Autistic to some degree.]

"Secondly, we have much better survival rates for premature babies and babies with certain conditions. There can be residual delays in development for these children that require special education. And thirdly, we've improved our ability to identify disabilities in general."

Rosemary Mannino, Director of the STARS Academy in Pine Bush, adds that there has been an increased awareness of "a lot of subtle disorders. The learning disorders, the language processing problems, emotional disorders, bipolar disorder."

Mannino observes that, "When I was in high school, these kids were the 'bad kids' and a lot of them dropped out of school."

There's a problem with that result. "For taxpayers, it's really pay now or pay later," Mannino puts it succinctly. "For every year of education completed, earning potential increases." And the likelihood of a career in crime, with its expensive use of prison ($36,000 per head per year in New York) decreases.

So, we have a worthwhile objective, which rewards society by educating these children and opening up productive lives for them. But our federal and state legislatures have placed much of the burden of paying for this on local taxpayers, which is what happens with every unfunded mandate from either Albany or Washington.

Of course, unfunded mandates are by no means the only reason that public education is expensive. Parents want the highest quality education they can get for their children. School districts vie with one another for state aid and grants to add programs. But as can be seen in the example of special education, the urge to do the right thing is too often kept separate from the requirement of paying for it. Legislators love signing mandates at the behest of one interest or another, but they hate picking up the check. That quirk of human nature is part of the cost of public education.