New Jersey state officials’ recent attempt to crack down on some unethical actions currently going on with the state’s private schools may end up doing more harm than good. Their goal is to crack down on problems like unnecessary spending and nepotism in NJ private schools. But critics say this may end up hurting private schools for disabled children, according to a recent NJ.com story.
This is something that could become a significant problem considering that here in NJ, we have 159 private schools for children with disabilities, with a total of 9,900 students. So this could definitely be something that affects a lot of disabled children.
Now, it’s completely understandable why state officials want to do something about these issues. After a three-year investigation, the Star-Ledger found that these private schools were doing some very shady things, like spending a lot of taxpayer money to help pay for luxury cars for school officials.
The Star-Ledger also found that one-fifth of the schools were engaging in nepotism, hiring family members, and also doing business with family members and associates. Now, cracking down on this won’t necessarily hurt disabled children in any way. The new regulation for this will simply be that private schools will have to disclose when they have relatives working for them. So that shouldn’t really be an issue.
But for the problem of too much unnecessary spending, the state will be cutting the money that goes towards these private schools. Teachers will be getting lower salaries in the future. And this could absolutely have a negative effect on the schools that really need that money, like the schools for disabled children.
So what should we do about this? Well, perhaps these regulations will have to be done on more of a case-by-case basis. Look at each individual private school and see if they really need the money that would go towards them. Make sure the schools are really using the money to improve the quality of education that the children receive. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. But it might be the only fair solution.
Links:
www.nj.com/education/2017/01/new_rules_for_nj_private_schools_will_hurt_disable.html
