Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Funding for private school?

I just heard today that students with disabilities on an IEP can recieve funding to help pay for private school tuition. Does this also apply to gifted students?

What? Where?

It is called the McKay Fund. If a parent has a child with a disability, who is on an IEP, that parent can use the money that would be spent on educating the student in a public school and apply it toward private school tuition. I do not know if this apllies to gifted students or not.

This is in Florida and is for students that have an IEP- the only catch is that you have to have been in public school for the entire school year in order to be eligible - they basically take what that student would be worth to the public school (depending on what services the child gets...obviously more services such as Speech and OT, the child gets more money)...then you find a McKay accepting private school and the state will give that school the money that your child would have been allocated at their public school. I have some very jaded opinions of this...my son has had an IEP since he was 3 in Florida. He gets both speech and OT and was considered a full time preschool student between ages 3-5. We applied to the McKay Scholarship the spring before his Kindergarten year and we were given x amount of dollars worth that we could in turn go to a school with...the only downside is that there were no McKay schools in our area that could meet my child's needs...we looked - TRUST me! After a rough start in a Charter school we had no choice but to pull him and homeschool him...if we could have found a McKay school for him before the end of the school year he would have been fine but the closest one we found was an hour drive and a 2 hour commute a day was just too much for a 5 year old...so we lost our McKay....we will never gain access to it again unless my son is back in public school for an entire school year. The McKay was started to help meet the needs of kids that were falling through the cracks in public school...which is my son to a perfect t and of course he is not eligible for it now