Last night’s fortune cookie –

I dig the Chinese lessons, even if the fortune seems more like a booty-kiss than a portent.

GrayPumpkin telephoned yesterday, while I was out gallivanting with Dan. Hopefully I’ll get a call back again this afternoon… it’s been a while since we caught up and gabbed.

Geraldo is still a reporter on Fox news? I thought they booted him for his desert shenanigans a year ago. I don’t actively watch Fox, seeing him on was a fluke of channel-surfing. It’s beyond me why a right-wing slanted network would keep him.

L.A. Story on the tube now. I could watch that movie a thousand times. You can really tell when Steve Martin is on his game, or just coasting for dollars. L.A. Story just presses so many of the right buttons with me. Music by Enya, Prophetic Traffic signs, something witty or touching in every line, well timed… and a beautiful love story.

Murray the Martial Arts Monkey

Downloaded Aeroplayer.. now I can listen to (.ogg) Livejournal phone posts via the palm. (and play mp3s in the background… much nicer than the default player.

In 2000, parents using a voucher for disabled children to send a child to the Dyslexia Research Institute did not have to supplement the state’s $4,700 check — state law prohibited the practice.

Four years later, thanks to a change in the law in 2001 done at the behest of the politically connected private school, those same parents will have to spend nearly $5,000 of their own money — almost matching the value of the $5,100 voucher — to get the same education.

The net effect: Low-income parents, whom the McKay voucher program was created to help, will now have to pay almost as much out of pocket this autumn as they would have before the voucher program was created, with the school’s administrators reaping most of the windfall from the voucher payment, former parents and teachers charge. “Tuition costs may rise for parents using vouchers”.

“That’s horrible. That’s nothing short of rape,” said Sen. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who served with school director Patricia Hardman on a Senate task force studying reported abuses in the program. “It turns out that this school is a poster child for why we need accountability.”

Hardman, who runs the nonprofit school, an affiliated for-profit testing business and a construction company from the same one-story building on the outskirts of Tallahassee, did not return numerous phone calls regarding this story.

Florida Department of Education spokesman MacKay Jimeson said, “Parents who have decided to use school-choice programs have a variety of schools to pick from that will help meet their child’s learning needs. Parents of dyslexic students who are unwilling to pay for a tuition increase can take advantage of many other excellent options in the area that will allow their children to get the valuable resources and tailored curriculum they need.”

The tuition and fees for voucher-taking parents of dyslexic children at Hardman’s school rose from about $4,700 in 2000-01 to $6,995 in 2001-02 to $7,500 this year, and will rise to $10,000 for 2004-05, according to documents from the school obtained by The Palm Beach Post and interviews with former teachers and parents of former students. Families with incomes between $40,000 and $60,000 a year are expected to pay an additional $1,000 in tuition, while families earning more than $60,000 are asked to pay $2,000 more, according to the fee schedules.

The latest increase means the out-of-pocket costs for low-income parents will increase from about $2,000 in 2001-02 to about $5,000 next year. Those fees are on top of the $550 diagnostic test all new students are required to take from Hardman and Associates, the school’s for-profit arm, the parents and teachers said.

While Hardman earns about $60,000 a year and her top administrator earns about $50,000, the school’s teachers currently make $12,000 a year — less than half of what starting teachers in Leon County’s public schools are paid. The school’s administrators have said the planned $2,500 tuition increase would be used to give teachers a choice next year of a $3,000 raise or health insurance.

One parent of a former student complained that with only 18 teachers, the proposed raises would account for just $54,000 of the additional $150,000 the tuition increase should generate. Tammy Jackson said when she accused school officials of planning to pocket the difference and threatened to complain, her son was expelled.

“I said, ‘I’m getting ready to call the Department of Education, because this has got to be illegal,'” Jackson said she told a teacher after learning of the tuition increase at a Dec. 4 meeting at the school. “I said something to the wrong person.”

The letter of expulsion for Jackson’s son said he was being expelled because of excessive absences, but Jackson said he had been absent more often the previous year and had not been expelled then. She also said his absences were due to her chronic illness.

Hardman was a key architect of the original McKay law, largely because of her friendship with former Senate President John McKay, after whom the voucher program for disabled students was named. She also was a leading proponent to delete the program’s original provision that participating schools be required to accept the voucher amount as full payment of tuition.

The change was done quietly enough that Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, and a voucher opponent who has followed the program since its inception, was not aware that it had taken place.

McKay early last year recommended that Hardman serve on current Senate President Jim King’s task force to study the program’s problems. Also on the 14-member panel was National Rifle Association lobbyist Marion Hammer, whose grandson is a student at Hardman’s school. And a frequent witness before the group was Robyn Rennick, Hardman’s top administrator at the school as well as Hardman’s business associate and co-owner of a lakefront home.

Hardman also enjoys a close relationship with Gov. Jeb Bush’s office, getting a one-on-on meeting with Bush during the next-to-last week of this spring’s legislative session to lobby him against adding regulations on the McKay program.

The proposed voucher “accountability” legislation, sparked by reports in The Post of poor oversight, fraud and abuse in all three of the state’s voucher programs, died on the last day of the session.

During her tenure on the task force and in appearances before legislative committees, Hardman had opposed any increased oversight as well as proposed requirements that schools be accredited and use certified teachers. She argued that she was an expert in dyslexia and did not need the government telling her how to run her school.

In 2001, though, an administrative law judge questioned her qualifications when she testified as an expert witness in a case where she diagnosed a child with “arithmetic dyscalculia,” a condition she said was related to dyslexia.

Judge P. Michael Ruff cited testimony from other experts when he decided that it wasn’t proven that any such malady exists. Ruff then criticized Hardman’s credentials: “Dr. Hardman does not have a degree in psychology, is not certified or licensed in Florida or any other state as a psychologist, is not currently certified as a teacher in Florida or any other state, and holds no certificate in the area of special education in Florida or any other state.”

Jackson said she believes her 13-year-old son, Jarvis, benefited during his years at Dyslexia Research Institute, which also is known as Woodland Hall Academy.

She said this was despite the large turnover in teachers each year because of low pay. This year, Jackson said, all but three of the 18 teachers at the start of the year were new.

Jarvis originally attended another Tallahassee private school with small class sizes from kindergarten through third grade, but Jackson said she had to transfer him to a public school six years ago when she left her job at Florida A&M University’s ROTC office after she started having health problems.

Jarvis was diagnosed as dyslexic at Wesson Elementary School, where Jackson said he was doing poorly in the larger classrooms.

When the McKay program was started, Jackson sent him to Woodland Hall.

Despite her inability to work full time — she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis this year — Jackson said she came up with the out-of-pocket expenses the school began demanding in 2001-02. But she said the latest tuition increase put Hardman’s school out of reach — even if Jarvis hadn’t been expelled.

When she complained to Hardman that she couldn’t afford a $2,500 tuition increase and that it wasn’t fair to expel Jarvis in the middle of a school year, “Dr. Hardman said, ‘We frankly don’t care. This is a business,’ ” Jackson said.

Wasserman Schultz said Jackson’s story underlines the need for both financial and academic oversight of the voucher programs — and a specific need to re-implement the law that requires McKay schools to accept the value of the voucher as full payment.

“This voucher program should not be a profit-making venture for entrepreneurs,” she said. (via the Palm Beach Post)